Crossed Wires
by Veritasa
Summary: "Do you wanna come with me? You'll see another dimension, Miranda Larsen, but I'll make it worth it." Before Rose, the Doctor crash-lands himself in another dimension long enough to bring back a companion. Now stuck in her new dimension, she has to figure out just what she is supposed to be to the Doctor. (Never fear shippers, doesn't preclude Rose OR River.) Spans 9/10/11.
1. Chapter 1

It was an average summer day. She was sitting with a glass of iced tea on her back porch, looking into the trees that lined the back of her property. The wind was blowing hard, signaling a summer storm moving through. She debated going inside to avoid the rain, but figured a few drops wouldn't hurt her. She walked around the house to at least close the windows so that things inside wouldn't get wet.

The wind picked up as she rounded back to the deck. It was a warm wind, though, and it brought the first spritz of rain. She reached for her tea, the sound of the wind whipping through the trees growing louder as she settled into her seat.

When she looked up, there was a blue phone booth of some sort in her back yard. The light on the top of it was blinking, and it was shrieking terribly. Keeping her eye on the contraption as it apparently settled into her range of vision, she sidled into the house and grabbed her cell phone and a pistol. She prepped the first with 911, just in case, and held the second loosely at her side. Then she walked warily toward the box.

She prodded it with her foot. It was solid, not really an apparition. She gave it a tap, and it echoed like wood. It was the truest blue she'd ever seen, and there was a row of windows at the top too high for her to see through, but just barely. She walked around it. There was nothing unusual about the exterior. It was a blue police call box, just like the sign on the front said. She tried the door. Locked. She kicked the door for good measure.

"Oy, what do you think you're doing?" A man popped his head out and glared at her. "That's my police box you're kicking." He stepped out of the box, forcing her to take a few steps back. She tightened the grip on her gun. He was a bit bigger than her, in a sweater and leather jacket despite the heat. She didn't trust his look. She didn't like that he and his police box were in her backyard.

"And your police box is on my property. So you'd better start explaining." She lifted the gun high enough that even a stray bullet would likely hit him in the foot, indicating just how serious she was.

"Your property?" He looked around. "Off again. I don't suppose this is anywhere near Chicago?"

She raised an eyebrow. "Near being the same country, sure. Hell, even the same region. But this is Michigan. Chicago's a six hour drive from here, easily."

"Michigan?"

"Michigan." She sighed. "You gonna explain yourself or what? I can call the police in if that makes it easier." It occurred to her that she probably should have said she had already called the police, but it was too late for that.

"Well, we sort of came off course, I guess. I was aiming for Chicago in 1929. I'm guessing I'm pretty far off."

"Like I said, six hours and 84 years off. Keep going."

"We hit a bit of a storm on the way in and ended up here. On your property. Sorry about that. I'll just get going…" He turned to go back inside and she cocked her gun.

"Oh no. Explain how your box ended up here."

"It's a ship."

"It's a box."

"Well, fine. Yes, I am a madman with a box, I suppose, but it's a very special box. It travels from place to place…"

"And time to time." She said this very plainly, without being impressed or incredulous. He frowned. He wanted to be impressive.

"Yes, well, it's actually a TARDIS."

"You're kidding me." She lowered her gun, but only just slightly. "A working TARDIS?"

"You, um, know what that is?"

"Time And Relative Dimension In Space." She tucked her gun away, clicking the safety on and walking one more time around the box. "Malfunctioning chameleon circuit? 1950s style British police box, trespassing, grinning pilot who is dressed entirely wrong and in the entirely wrong place?" She grinned. "Who are you?"

He matched her grin, spreading from ear to ear –which almost balanced the big ears and big nose. The grin looked good on him, she had to admit. "I'm the Doctor."

She resisted the urge to hug him. Even if this was a giant hoax, this was amazing. This was magnificent. Every girl had the urge to hear that phrase uttered directly to her. "Wow," was all she could manage.

His grin was self-sustaining now. She was impressed. Not with his TARDIS or his ability to time travel, but with him. "You know who I am?"

"I've heard of you. You're kind of a big deal." She stretched up onto her tiptoes to see inside, then huffed in frustration. She gripped her fingers against the small ridge along the TARDIS' windows, then pushed against her garage – only a foot or so away – lifting herself high enough to see in. To her surprise and disappointment, it looked just like an empty police box. She dropped to the ground.

He was watching her with amusement. "I am, in fact, a big deal. But you know who I am, now who are you?"

"Miranda Larsen. Can I get you some tea? I think it's about to storm, and I might as well be hospitable about it, even if you did just pop in unannounced." She smiled again, her eyes dancing back and forth between the Doctor and the TARDIS. Sure enough, she no sooner spoke than the thundercloud broke open, dumping a solid sheet of rain on both of them. She shivered slightly as the wind rushed past her, but other than that, she barely indicated that she felt the weather. "Besides, you won't want to get that leather jacket wet. I'll bet good tanned leather's hard to come by in space." She walked a few feet toward the house. "Come on then. I'll get you a towel and some tea. When the storm's done, you can head off to Chicago, 1929. You after the Valentine's Day Massacre or something?"

"Or something." He followed her at a safe distance, but was rather happy she invited him in. He wanted to know how she knew about him. What she knew about him. He closed the door behind him, taking a moment to look at the rain as it fell. He was really in the middle of nowhere, he could tell. Not a town for miles. And she lived out here.

A towel impacted the side of his head, and he caught it before it hit the ground. "Sorry about that. Thought you were listening." She moved up beside him, watching the rain. "It's gorgeous, isn't it? After Dad died, I couldn't bear to sell this. Couldn't keep both though, so I sold my place in Detroit and moved back here." She turned away, fluffing her own towel lightly through her hair, then laying it over the doorknob. "Here, let me take your jacket, get it dried off." She eyed him. "I have a t-shirt you can wear if you want to dry those things."

"I'll be fine. Thanks though."

She shrugged and pointed toward the living room. "Go ahead and make yourself at home. I'll bring in the tea in a second." He did as he was told and watched her move around the kitchen as he sat on the couch, taking a moment to put his towel underneath him before he sat. She pulled down a glass and filled it with ice, then with tea from the refrigerator. She took out her gun and put it on the table, then joined him in the living room. "There you are." She took a sip of her own and watched him drink. "You don't have a companion with you, do you? I mean, they're welcome to come in as well."

"Nah, nobody travelling with me these days. Just me and my TARDIS and the stars. How'd you know about all that, by the way?"

"You know, you just hear things. And the stories told about you are pretty impressive." She frowned. "Doctor… that time storm you hit… is there any chance it could have thrown you through a dimensional wormhole?"

He frowned, the idea occurring to him for the first time as well. "I suppose. It was a bit of a crash landing. If that's the case, though, I need to go." He stood up, then looked back down at her. "Why do you ask?"

"Cause here…" she hesitated. The look on his face prompted her on. "Here you're a fictional character. A TV show."

"A TV show?"

"Yeah. You're the…" her eyes swept over him again. "Ninth incarnation of yourself?"

"Yes…"

"Yeah, nine actors." She thought about asking about Rose. Instead, she bit her tongue.

"Well that's fantastic! I have a TV show. Even in another dimension, I'm on the move!"

She laughed with him, listening as the sudden downpour trickled away. "If you need to go, though, Doctor, you probably should. If the storms energy helped at all, you may want to get going before it's gone."

"Good advice." He finished his tea, setting the drained glass down with a triumph. "Well, I'm off then." She stood to show him out. It was a strange little interlude, but she was sure she wouldn't ever forget it. Not that anyone would believe her. They'd say she was going mad in her little cabin in the middle of nowhere.

"Thanks for dropping in. You're welcome anytime." She picked up the glass and followed him out to the kitchen. She leaned against the sink, waiting for him to leave.

"Unless you want to come with me?"

She swallowed hard, not quite believing her ears. "Come with you?" she squeaked.

"Yeah, sorry, was that a bad idea? I only thought…" He rubbed the back of his neck nervously.

She touched his elbow, practically glowing. "Doctor, I would love to travel with you."

"You've seen what I do? It can be dangerous."

"And interesting and amazing. There are whole worlds out there. Not to mention all the amazing things in here." She tapped his forehead lightly. "Are you sure that you want me to come?"

He grinned, and she couldn't help but mirror him. "More sure every second. Come on." He twined his fingers with hers and she ran into the rain with him. With the Doctor. And then suddenly she was inside the TARDIS.


	2. Chapter 2

He closed the door behind them and moved confidently to the control panels. "Where to, then? Shall we continue on to Chicago? Or maybe the stars? The future or the past? So many possibilities!" He moved around the controls like an eager child showing off his train set, and she watched him for a moment. He wasn't really asking her. And then she realized she was in the TARDIS.

The ship was beautiful. Industrial, and definitely a ship, but beautiful. She ran her hand reverently over the metal handrail as she climbed up the steps toward him. She settled into the captain's chair, watching his hands move with quick assuredness. She was sitting in the TARDIS with the Doctor at the controls. She may have actually squeaked at that point. She became aware around that moment that he was talking – narrating what he was doing.

"We could go to the future, though retracing my path through the dimensional fall should be easier, so we'll start with that. Takes a lot of energy to move between dimensions these days." She vaguely remembered something about the great power source of the Time Lords, and that it wasn't around anymore. She hoped he could get them out of there. She realized with a start that she was leaving everything. With his other companions, he could always take them home. Cross-dimensional travel was hard. Impossible even. She felt a slight constriction in her lungs.

"There. On track for Barcelona, year 52836, back in the correct dimension." He seemed to notice her again. "Hey there, you alright? Miranda?" He took a seat in the chair next to her, watching her with concern.

"I'm fine. Just… a lot to cope with in a single realization." She let out a rush of breath. "One minute you're sitting at your cabin without a soul for miles, the next you've left your dimension behind forever and are traveling with…" She set her shoulders in a straight line and turned the corners of her mouth up as she met his eye. "With a madman in a box." She stood up, watching the pump move up and down as the Time Vortex swirled beneath them. She gripped the handrail. "Barcelona, you said? The planet?"

He tucked his fingers through hers again, and she took comfort from that. "Yep. You know, they have dogs with no noses?"

Her eyes narrowed with a wry smile. "No noses? Then Doctor, how do they smell?"

He caught the play in her voice, and knew she understood the joke. "Always funny, that one." He looked down when he thought she was squeezing his hand, but realized she was shivering. The Tardis wasn't nearly as warm as the summer day she'd just come from. "But you need a new wardrobe. It's just down the corridor, second right, then the third left, past the head, take the right fork, then second room on the right. Got that?"

She shivered again, pulling her hand back to wrap around herself. "I'll be right back then." She paused at the doorway. "What does one wear on Barcelona, Doctor?"

"Oh, anything you fancy. It's a pretty relaxed place, Barcelona." He went back to making minor adjustments to their flight path, worry lines easing out of his face as he realized they were back in his dimension. She had chosen to come with him. She had understood what dimensional travel meant. She wanted to be there. He kept trying to convince himself of that. He has asked with no time for her to really consider. He could never take her home. He leaned back against the rail. He had just made her as homeless as he was.

#

A/N: Short, I know, but there's dogs with no noses in the next chapter! And that joke never gets old!


	3. Chapter 3

She went through the wardrobe with increasing disgust. Apparently all of his companions had been skinny and rather short. She was nearly as tall as the Doctor, and her pear shape took her right out of the skinny category, at least as far as jeans went. The TARDIS could probably help her out, but she wasn't quite sure how to ask yet. Did she just say, "Hello, TARDIS, can you please bring the clothes that would fit me to the front?" Or was there some secret code? She'd have to ask. For now, she settled on a green dress that settled down nicely on her hips and a pair of brown knee-high boots that were actually flat. It would keep her warm enough for now. Hopefully Barcelona had jeans stores.

She passed a mirror, and had the sudden urge to look pretty. She could only imagine that she'd be doing a lot of running, but she wanted to look good while running with him. She tried to control her hormonal brain, but rummaged through a pile until she found a ribbon to tie her hair back with. She gave herself a quick once-over and decided it was good enough. A jacket from a hook near the door warmed her up nicely. She felt the TARDIS jolt to a stop as she was entering the control room. The Doctor's back was to her, and she watched him for a second. He really knew what he was doing.

She had to trust that now. She really didn't have anywhere to go. Without the Doctor, now, she'd be stranded. She hadn't realized just how much she trusted him until then. It was silly to trust someone she'd never met based on a TV show that wasn't supposed to be real. But trust him she did. Every confident move of the controls reinforced that. She padded down the stairs. "Do they sell jeans on Barcelona?"

He whipped around as though he hadn't known she was there until just then. Must have been lost in his own thoughts, she reasoned. She watched him closely as his eyes moved over her, evaluating her clothing. "I hope this is all right," she offered weakly.

"It's fine. It's beyond fine. You look fantastic." He turned and spun a dial. "But to answer your question, I believe they do. But the TARDIS will have some for you once she's back to full power."

"Oh, ok. Didn't know how that worked." She consciously unbunched her hands from the fabric of her dress, smoothing it over.

He slid his hand into hers and helped her up, tucking her arm in his. "Shall we?"

She giggled nervously and followed him down the stairs. He pushed open the door confidently, and stepped outside first, holding out a hand for her. She stepped out into the sun slowly. It was a beautiful world. The sun seemed to make the colors deep rather than bright, and everywhere she looked there were different beings – a byproduct of it being 52836, she imagined. She wondered if that was AD, or not based on earth time at all. She'd have to ask.

"What to do first? Sample the local fare? Take a tour? Beautiful fruit trees here. They grow bananas that are just fantastic." He began to lead her through the streets, narrating as he did so. "Barcelona the planet came before the city on Earth, of course. The natives from this planet made a bit of a resort of the city, naming it after themselves and all that. They even showed Gaudi pictures of their home planet's architecture, which is how he got his distinctive style. And his reputation for being a little nutty."

Sure enough, the streets were lined with beautiful buildings, the likes of which could only be seen on earth in Gaudi's handiwork. She stopped and looked up. "La Sagrada Familia…" she breathed. "Saw it once."

He grinned, giving her a long moment to look up at it. The look of awe on her face drew him in. He sometimes forgot how full of wonder just being on a planet was. He was glad this was a good choice. She tilted her head back – and back, until she was looking nearly straight up. "This is the original – the name means Star-Touching Temple in the language their sacred text is written in. It's the temple to their great god. It's much larger than La Sagrada Familia."

"It's enormous. It would dwarf the Sears Tower."

"Oh, lots of things dwarf that. The Sphere of Gonza on Minarin 8, for example. It's a blue spherical structure that houses all the science labs on that planet. It's nearly half the size of Earth's moon, though. Absolutely enormous. Or the law center on Moxx. A series of towers that seem separate on the ground but all connect near the top, where the highest court meets. A real feat of engineering genius, especially considering how often they have earthquakes. The building has to actually grow itself to accommodate shifts in the ground below."

"That's possible?" She tore her eyes away from the building in front of her, fixing the Doctor with the same look of awe and wonder. He could bask in that look for hours.

"'Course it's possible. Bio-engineered building materials become pretty common, even on Earth, roundabouts the fifty-sixth century."

She lifted her eyes back to the temple. "So the fifty-something centuries are big on Earth, then. Time Agents, bio-engineering materials, and Jack Harkness." She laughed, and he frowned.

"Jack who?"

She played it off, keeping the same smile on her face. She hadn't pinpointed exactly where in his timeline she was, or whether this was even the same timeline. "It's another TV show back home."

"Oh." She shifted closer to him, her shoulder brushing his arm. She walked with him a ways, the mood having shifted somehow. "Miranda, your home… I can't…"

"I know. I really do." She stopped and pivoted to face him. "Doctor, you offered me a gift. I took it. I knew the consequences. I'll still be homesick now and then, but I'm glad I came. Just promise when you're done with me you'll at least leave me somewhere I can get by." It was a small, sad smile, seared through with the knowledge that he left all companions behind, one by one, leaving them to watch the stars and wonder what might have been if they'd have stayed. She knew.

He pressed her against him in a quick hug. "I'll make it worth it, Miranda Larsen. I promise you that."

She kissed his cheek idly, then stepped back. "So, Doctor, I hear the fruit trees are amazing." She grinned widely, and he squeezed her hand.

"Bananas especially." He lifted his hand and snapped three times. Almost instantly, a small vehicle stopped in front of them. "All aboard." The vehicle had only one wheel, and they were seated high above the driver in an open top vehicle. The view of the city was amazing. "To Capex Farms, if you don't mind." The small creature nodded – at least Miranda thought it nodded, and they began to move rapidly through traffic.

She tried not to look too much like a tourist, or to strain her neck. The Doctor, meanwhile, was narrating everything they passed, pointing out the past present and future of the buildings and the people and all the things she might ever need to know. The noise of traffic grew louder, and she rested her head on his shoulder in order to hear the narration.

He noticed she was there, sitting close to him in the two person taxi, her hand still in his, and now her head resting on his shoulder. Of course he knew she was there. But it was comfortable so far. His left heart, the one closer to her, was beating slightly faster. He kept talking. "And the star system named Barcelona was named an interspecial treasure, and the cultural icons were kept in place despite the colonization by other beings…"

"Who colonized it?"

"Lots of people have. Even the humans will be the dominant species at some point. They're never very violent takeovers. In fact, Barcelona hasn't seen a war in eight centuries. It's rather impressive."

"Part of why you like coming here so much."

"I suppose." He looked down at her. "Never really thought of it like that."

"Well, that and the dogs with no noses." She laughed again. "Can we see some of them, by the way?"

"Your wish is my command, milady."

She pushed his arm lightly. "Promises, promises. But if I know you, there will be some catastrophe we'll have to fix or problem with time that we'll have to solve."

"Like there not being any bananas!"

"Just like that." She laughed. She noticed he wasn't laughing. "You are joking, right? There isn't a problem with the bananas?" She gave him a worried look as the taxi came to a stop.

"Nah," he countered. "Bananas aplenty." He paid the driver, then offered her a hand down from the car. "The Barcelonans brought them back from Earth and made this a grove site." She let him wonder for a minute, then wandered up to the gate. The Doctor approached her as she took it in. "I like bananas."

"I'll have to keep that in mind." She smirked. "Do you also like dancing?"

"I love dancing! I do a fine jitterbug, if I can brag a little bit."

She giggled despite herself. "Oh, you can brag. You'll have to show me sometime." She couldn't believe she was saying these things. It wasn't like her. She took a deep breath and felt as though the giddiness flooded her. Something was wrong, and she felt it in part of her brain. But the rest of her just didn't care.

The Doctor noticed. He sniffed the air lightly, scenting chemicals that just shouldn't be there. Chemicals that were oddly intoxicating to human beings, causing reactions similar to alcohol. A lowering of inhibitions, perhaps even mildly aphrodisiacs. But where were they coming from? He walked away from Miranda, his mind in full analytical mode, trying to determine the source of the out of place chemical mixture. He didn't realize that he was leaving her behind until he turned around and she was gone.


	4. Chapter 4

Well, leave it to her to drive him off with her innuendo that she wasn't even really into. What did she care if the Doctor left her behind? He probably wanted to go have a sesh with his beloved bananas. She giggled through her conscious frown, and that little part of her shuddered. She didn't much like being out of control. But all the same, if she just gave into it and stopped worrying, it could be fun. After all, the Doctor had already left her, so she figured she couldn't do too much to screw it up…

She took another deep breath, trying to get drunk off whatever was making her like this. It was coming from a building at the edge of the farm complex. A steady line of smoke was coming up from the chimney, but even in her state she could tell that it wasn't wood smoke, or even just coal smoke. Something pricked at the back of her mind, a shot of pain linked to a memory she couldn't quite recall.

She walked confidently toward the building, and it was only when security stopped her that she decided she should probably think up a story. That's when she heard the sound. In the distance, she could hear a rifle – 30 06, from the sound – being fired in the back. Strange weapon to be using on a clearly advanced alien planet.

"No access to this building ma'am, except for inspectors." He was a humanoid creature, so tall that she had to tilt her head all the way back to look up at him. The sound came again, followed by the prick of memory. "For the 30 06 test rounds? I know." She tried to pretend that the size of the security guard didn't scare her near to death, or that her mind was busy doing cartwheels off whatever chemical was being produced. God, she was drunk. But now was not the time to give into the sensations. She focused on his words, thanking the stars for the TARDIS psychic translations, leaving her to focus on correctly forming sounds with her own tongue and teeth.

"I'm sorry ma'am, didn't know you were part of that. Do you have your pass?"

Her what? She thought fast, adopting an annoyed, irate air. "Damn good question. And if your security team was more vigilant about patrolling the rest of the farm, I would. Honestly, how would there be any way for me to know that I was going to be pickpocketed ON SITE?" She shouted the last two words, glaring up at him. "So you know what? If you don't want to let me through, that's just dandy. I can report back that not only was I robbed before arriving, the whole thing is just a shit show." She turned on her heel.

"No, ma'am, it's not like that… Who did you say you were representing today?"

"Guild of Turin." She felt like that had been a title to something – maybe a Tolkien book? Not quite. Didn't matter. Her brain was reminding her gleefully of how drunk she was and how much effort this was taking to keep being creative and lying. It made her ornery. To her surprise, though, he nodded.

"Of course ma'am. Go on in." He handed her a security pass. "If you just go in through that front door, you'll be able to observe the manufacturing wing.

"Thank you," she managed. She forced each foot in front of the other until she was out of sight from the security booth, then she leaned against a wall, breathing through the fabric of her shirt in case that was a way to filter out whatever was getting to her. She was starting to get lightheaded again. "That was too easy," she muttered."

"What were you talking about – thirty aught six?" She started when she heard the Doctor's voice.

"It's a gun. The sound in the background – that's the type of weapon."

"You can recognize it by the sound?"

She shrugged. "I was raised with guns. My dad used to take me shooting a lot. My neighbors all had guns. It was just something that was part of how I learned." She looked him over. "So how'd you get in?"

He held up the sonic screwdriver and grinned. Then he looked at her again, concern marking his features. "You alright?"

"Peachy." She mentally steeled herself. She needed to pull herself together. Whatever was getting to her was clearly not affecting the Doctor, and something was wrong. There was something oh-so-wrong. And guns. And the Doctor. Who was looking at her with those gorgeous blue eyes and… She gritted her teeth and stood up straight. "What's the problem here?"

"Factory's producing some kind of weaponry with a chemical byproduct. It hasn't been detected yet because it doesn't seem to affect the natives or current colonizers. In fact it only seems to affect, well, humans." He looked slightly guilty at this, as though it was his fault.

"And 30 06 rifles have what to do with all of this?" She was still trying to force her thoughts into coherent order and felt like she may have been missing something.

"Dunno. Wanna find out?" He grinned, and she was at least relieved that she wasn't being stupid. She followed behind him as they approached the factory door.

It was a huge thing, full of metal and fire and gunpowder. And the chemical was almost overwhelming. There were guns lying everywhere, different models on display. She picked one up – a part of her brain whispered that it was a bad idea to be playing with guns in this state, but what did she care? She inspected it closely, looking for traditional loading and firing mechanisms. The Doctor lifted it gently from her hands. "Laser weaponry. High heat variety. Very dangerous." He said this as though he was chiding a naughty 5 year old. She pouted.

"Yeah, right. No touchy for the human, got it."

"The drunk human."

She sneered at him, sticking her tongue out for good measure. Thinking that might have ruined the sneer, she turned away from him and walked around a large tank, pocketing a long-range pistol when she did. Safety was on. She checked. And then she stumbled.

The Doctor caught her elbows. "You need to get out of here. Off the grounds. Can you get far enough away to be able to breathe?" He was concerned about her, but there were clearly bigger things on his mind. So she nodded. She could walk away on her own. If she couldn't help, the least she could do was not get in his way while he was saving the world. She squeezed his arm reassuringly and made for the door. She even made it a few dozen solid steps outside the door before stumbling the first time. Her head was swimming. It was the line between being drunk and being on a rager. She would black out soon, the logical part of herself reminded. She hated the logical part of herself when she was like this.

She needed to get further away or she would breathe herself to death. She giggled at that. If she stopped breathing she'd die, if she kept breathing she might die. Sounded like terrible odds to her. But it's what she got for being curious. And traveling with the Doctor who thought she was a liability or an incidental, she wasn't sure which. But she kept walking. And then, she stopped.

The Doctor found her when he was running out of the building about half an hour later. He'd rigged the thing to blow, and here she was, curled up on the grass like it was the world's best place to nap. He knelt down and shook her, and she came too, slightly less groggy than before. She was still drunk, and they both knew it. "We have to go, Miranda! The thing's gonna blow!" He could hear the countdown in his head, and suddenly just covered her body with his.

Nothing happened. The door that he'd left open in his haste swung idly, and he realized that he'd let the buildup of flammable gases escape with him. She wriggled out from underneath him as he calculated his frustration. "You just want to blow the thing up? It's all combustible right? Yeah?" She took a few steps away from him, her hands in her pockets, looking between him and the building, her lips pursed over-dramatically.

"That's the gist of it, yep. Just didn't quite…" He jumped when the first blast rang through the air. He realized as he tackled her to the ground that it had been her – she had a gun in her hand and had somehow made the laser shot through the open door, setting the whole thing alight. It crunched down on itself, the building absolutely decimated. She was crying as the gun flew from her hand, though she wiped it away along with a smear of blood. It hadn't quite worked as planned. She realized, then, that she didn't even know if there were people in there. Her heart dropped into the pit of her stomach.

When the blasts settled, she stood up hurriedly, ignoring the swimming in her head that was compounded by the nick on her forehead that couldn't seem to stop bleeding. She probably looked a sight, and didn't want him to see. So she walked with calm reassurance until they were out of sight of the explosion, around another building corner. The Doctor was a few feet behind her, and began to tear into her as he rounded. "I should have known better than to bring someone who pointed a gun at me first thing. Your kind just picks up a gun as the first answer, don't you? You just…" He saw her then, leaning against the wall, eyes squeezed shut, brow furrowed.

He cooled considerably during her thought process, and reached out to touch her arm. She flinched back, fixing him with an icy glare. "My kind, is it? Humans? Women? People who know how to shoot? You were trying to blow the place yourself, you hypocrite! For god's sake Doctor, having blood on your hands isn't exactly pleasant for anyone." The unspoken continuation – you should know. She bent her knees and slid down onto the pavement. The blue-gray of the sidewalk and the deep maroon of the building shimmered as the sun danced through the leaves, and she mourned for this beautiful planet that somehow had drawn "her kind" to it. And all they wanted to do was destroy it.

"You regret having brought me." She added it several moments later, the weight of the words filling the space between them ballooning outward from her until it seemed to reach the edges of space. The whole world was bearing the weight of those words and the silence that surrounded them.

The Doctor took a breath. He had been so ready to condemn her, to see her as part of all of this destruction. But she was right – no one really wanted blood on their hands. And she didn't seem like the sort who could just wash it away like Pontius Pilate. He opened his mouth to respond, and closed it again.

She wasn't looking, but she could almost feel the stretch of his jaw as he nearly said something, but stopped. Nearly denied it, out of courtesy, but couldn't. She felt something click into place within her – a bulwark snapping shut. "Let's just get back to the TARDIS, yeah?"

He seemed to notice the blood on the side of her face from the cut above her temple. Her took her hand and ordered her into the next passing cab. He was sure the cab driver thought he was murdering her, but he didn't particularly care what the cab driver thought. His mind was racing to the medical bay of the TARDIS and whether he had and bio-adaptable medi-compound left. He was sure he had some programmed to himself, but a bit of human cellular regeneration was what she needed. He took her hand and led her back to the TARDIS slowly. She felt like he was racing through the streets with her.

The TARDIS door was quickly becoming her favorite sight. The first time because, well, it was the TARDIS. This time, more because she hadn't been able to see straight in what seemed like forever and she felt like the Doctor had just dragged her through a race at full sprint. She could feel her muscles twitching hard, her lungs practically shrieking for a rest so they could catch up, and each beat of her heart thundering through her ears. Blood, oxygen, water. She leaned against the closed TARDIS door and let her body catch up.

The Doctor, meanwhile, had gotten lost in the glory of his new idea. "Always keep a supply in the medical bay, you know. It's important stuff if you get hurt." He was talking to himself, perhaps, or narrating to her. It wasn't a debatable line. Not that she had any spare breath to debate. They must have looked like lunatics outside, the tall man in the leather jacket and sweater and the bleeding woman he was practically dragging along behind him. Well, she thought, they were both a bit mad, so appearances weren't all that deceiving.

She closed her eyes as blood started to swarm her vision with cloudy darkness. It would only last a minute while her body readjusted to normal blood pressure. She wasn't losing _that_ much blood. She counted slowly, tapping her wrist to the beat she whispered. A small attempt to reset her blood pressure. Her adrenaline kick was dying off. She was feeling almost normal. She opened her eyes. The Doctor was nowhere to be seen. He'd probably skittered off to themedical bay to get some ofwhatever he was talking about.

She sagged into the captain's chair and leaned back. The Doctor's voice was just audible, though she couldn't make out his words. He'd just have to repeat himself if he wanted to tell her anything important. It didn't really matter, of course. He was going to find a way to leave her behind soon. Or she would find a way to leave him. It was inevitable. He already regretted bringing her.

She leaned her head back, listening to the dull hum of the TARDIS' systems. Low and comforting, it aided the sudden drop off in adrenaline and slow drip of blood out of the gash on her head in making her doze off.

The Time Vortex swirled in the heart of the TARDIS. Perhaps it sensed another being that had crossed the void, or it recognized that Miranda Larsen was not really of this world, or any world in this dimension. The mix of the Void and the Time Vortex could not help but change even the most normal person. Perhaps Miranda Larsen had been normal when she sat on her back porch in her world. Perhaps she had been normal when she first stepped onto the TARDIS. Perhaps. But she was not now.

Half-asleep in the control room of the TARDIS, the hum grew louder in her ears, filling her mind like a too-loud meeting. So many noises and voices. They all meant something, she knew, if only she could listen to one of them instead of the cacophony of all of them. She tried to focus on one, any one. She started with the one that seemed closest. It was a faint woman's voice. It was still humming, but it was a simple tune rather than a monotonous buzz. It calmed her and helped her to focus. She didn't think she knew the melody, but it was familiar all the same.

She listened for a long while, the song repeating itself a few times. She was tempted to just let it lull her into a deep, oblivious sleep, but there were so many other voices to hear. She drew herself away and listened to another voice.

It was a voice she didn't quite recognize. Male. British accent - Received Pronunciation. She tried to focus her eyes, but there wasn't really anything to see. So she listened. It was a voice already full of anger and pain. "This is too much - too many horrors have been unleashed. It has to be stopped somehow..." There was so much grief in those words, but the next sentence nearly undid her as it choked out its conclusion. "I have to stop it. I have to fix what we've done."

She pulled back, trying to find another voice that would make the pain echoing in her head stop. She listened for the humming voice from before, but it was strangely quiet now. She struggled to isolate one voice - any voice - in the mess of her mind. "...All of time and space." She flew towards those words, not caring what they were about or who spoke them, just needing the reassurance of hearing them. "All of time and space."

She wanted to ask what about all of time and space, but she felt the voice's pause was full of its own questions. After a moment, she heard the same voice, soft and thoughtful. "How could she be so wrong? There are so many of them, in so many worlds and so many times, and they always think...She'll save every world we see and still think that if I let her." The northern British accent was familiar even now. "If we make it through this, we'll see about changing that." There was resolution in his voice. She wondered when this was, or if was even real. She doubted it. She'd learned a long time ago that dreams were more likely to be fantasies or nightmares than anything else. The power of dreams was that they weren't real.

But if it was - and if he was talking about her - maybe he didn't want her gone. Maybe she was overreacting and he was under-reacting and there was bound to be a way to meet in the middle. She dared hope for a minute. Then another voice, loud and definite, raging at something or someone or - her heart seized with the thought - her: "Stupid apes! All of them putting their noses where they don't belong and getting in the way of everything. Can't see their hands in front of their faces when it comes to time and space. Nothing but monkeys launched in a rocket." That voice, she understood with painful certainty, that voice was also the Doctor's.

She fled from her own dream, shaken, struggling to feel the reality of the chair beneath her, fighting through the barrier between dream world and waking. It stole her breath. And then it was over. The only hum was that of the TARDIS. She was alone in the control room. She rested her head back and took a deep breath. She would save this world with him. And then she would take her stupid ape self elsewhere.


	5. Chapter 5

The Doctor realized that she wasn't with him, but he kept narrating nonetheless. She wasn't used to the running, and his excitement had worn her out. He could tell, too, that she'd withdrawn from him, even since they arrived here. Since she'd gone native and he'd accused her of trying to destroy the world that she was, in reality, trying to save in her own little human way. He sighed. He would never admit it out loud, but even his Time Lord mental faculties could never quite figure out humans. Particularly female humans. He'd spent so much time around them, maybe too much time, and still they managed to surprise, delight, and infuriate him in a way no other type of being could. Miranda was just another in that long line.

He felt the whisper of the TARDIS on the edge of his mind, she was trying to say something but not to him. He patted the wall in the hallway as he walked slowly back toward the control room. "She's only human, sexy. She's not quite the type to pick up on your communiques." He felt another ripple, like a chuckle or a song, and he smiled. By all things good in the universe, he did love his ship.

Miranda was asleep in one of the captain's chairs, but he made no effort to be quiet as he sprinted up the metal steps, each one ringing dully in the huge space. She didn't move, and he ignored her as he set about punching control buttons, asking his TARDIS for a few favors and a little bit of chemistry. He felt another brief caress of the mind, a sign of affection from his ship, perhaps, or sympathy. He acknowledged it, then brushed it aside. He had a lot of work to do before the compound would work on her. The supply he generally carried was tailored to Time Lord physiology. He could only imagine what using that on her would do. So he was rearranging the bio-adaptable material to the human genome. He could do it, but he needed to focus.

He worked for hours - 3 hours, 47 minutes, and 22 seconds, by Earth time. He liked Earth time. It was a little unwieldy - he would never understand why they didn't break it down into a base 10 system, or their brilliant little adaptation of leap years, but he liked it. He could feel it tick by in his head now, and had grown so used to it that he measured all time by that, if he felt like measuring time. There wasn't often need to.

At 3 hours, 47 minutes, and 23 seconds, she finally stirred. He set down his science project - it would win any science fair on Earth, or a hundred other planets that were still in their toddler stages of science. He could feel her moving, though her steps were oddly silent. She was stealthy, he would give her that. He closed his eyes and took a deep breath, the scent of her on the air. It was intoxicating, as it always was. The taste for immediacy and whatever lay just beyond the accessible, was so distinctly human. It was why he loved Earth so much. Why he loved humans. At the moment, he just wasn't sure about her.

She didn't ask him about what he was doing. She stepped around him, not even acknowledging he was there, admiring the ship. He hated being ignored when he was feeling impressive, but the way she was looking, awe-struck, at each piece of equipment, it was almost as good. He didn't hold it against her. After all, with his daft old face with nose and ears too big for the head they were on, the TARDIS was a much more attractive piece of eye candy. He let her look, catching her out of the corner of his eye and smiling to himself. She walked behind him, still those silent footsteps, and he lost track of her for a moment while he pretended to be focused on his work. When she didn't reappear, he went back to work, though his mind was on where she could possibly wander off to.

"Hey. Want some tea?" She was standing a few feet from him, watching him work, a steaming cup of tea in each hand.

He wondered how long she'd been there, but grinned. "That would be fantastic, thanks." He took it from her. He loved tea just about as much as he loved bananas. He noticed she took hers black too, and filed that away in his memory. "This stuff's practically ready, if you wanna get that scar off your head." She sipped her tea silently, watching him. It made him nervous. "Then there's plenty of time for a tour 'round the TARDIS if you'd like."

"That would be nice," she confirmed quietly. He didn't know what he'd done to lose her, but it was clear that he was, indeed, losing her. He resolved to do what he could to prevent it. He held a hand out to her, pretending not to notice the hesitation in her arm when she finally took it.

"You must have found the kitchen," he began, walking slowly down the steps as each of them sipped their tea. He felt his fingers buzz with the warmth of her, and he unconsciously looped his fingers through hers. "And I've been terrible and not even showed you where you could lay down. Captain's chair's not exactly comfortable."

"It wasn't bad, actually. Hardly a crick in my neck." Her eyes were casting about, lighting on each thing for only a moment before moving on. "I'm just not used to your level of energy. Next time maybe you should choose a marathon runner." She said it flatly, and though he thought she was joking, he wasn't sure.

"Nah, you're just fine. No marathon's needed. I just get carried away, forget that two hearts and a respiratory bypass system are such an advantage when running."

"Superior Time Lord physiology." A small smile played on her lips.

"Quite right." He stopped by a door and had to let go of her hand to open it. "This room's the closest to the control room, if you'd like it. It's not much now, but we can work on that."

She walked to the middle of the room and turned around slowly. There was a bed and a small dresser. Not much else. It occurred to her that she didn't have much else. "This will do wonderfully." It also occurred to her he'd probably drop her off somewhere soon, so she wouldn't need to get more used to the place than to a hotel. "Thanks."

"Did you want to, um, lie down for a bit? I can just…" He made for the exit.

"If you don't mind, I'd like to get a bandage of some sort for all this." She made a vague gesture toward her face. "But then I'd like to see a bit more of the TARDIS." She forced it out of her, but she didn't know if she'd ever get another chance. "Please."

He finished his tea and set it down on the dresser. "Of course. You should know your way around. I tend to get distracted." He grinned again, and she felt a reflection of it on her face. She offered her hand tentatively to him. He took it and led her to the medical bay. It wasn't fancy at first glance, but she was sure that every cabinet held a material or an instrument that any surgeon on Earth would kill for. He put on a glove and dipped his thumb in the small container of goop he'd brought along, then smoothed it over her forehead. It burned, and she flinched, but the coolness of his breath made her shiver. He pretended not to notice. After a moment, the burning stopped, and he wiped her forehead clean with a cloth. "There you are. There's a mirror just there if you want to clean the blood off your face."

He handed her a clean cloth and turned away from her out of courtesy. She stood quietly and wiped the cloth over her face, removing the grime from her nap on the grass, little bits of blackness she assumed were from the explosion, and the blood that had no obvious source now. There wasn't even a scar where a few minutes before had been a rather impressively bleeding cut. She gave her face one last wipe with the clean side of the cloth before tossing it in the hazardous materials bin. She figured her blood was probably hazardous. Feeling mostly cleaned up, she walked up to the Doctor, sliding her hand into his.

They walked in silence for a while, the Doctor suppressing his need to narrate, letting her soak in the ship. The TARDIS was really a grand piece of machinery, and so much more than that. She asked questions now and again, and he nearly tripped over himself to answer them. Mostly, there was silence between the two, but even that spoke volumes. It was a terse silence at first, and the crackling energy the Doctor seemed to feel where there hands met was startling in its intensity.

It mellowed though, into a companionable quiet. He found himself watching her, catching her eye occasionally when she was watching him. They were both nervous. He hadn't been this nervous around a companion before. Then again, he had always been able to take them home. But as they walked through the winding hallways of the TARDIS, the silence was almost friendly.

He had stopped to fix a door that wasn't quite shutting right, his sonic screwdriver in hand. She was leaning against the door frame across the hallway, watching him. He liked the opportunity to show off. She was content enough too. He didn't seem as eager to throw her out of his ship now, though she wasn't sure how that had come about. She'd lingered with her own thoughts during the walk, and imagined that he'd done the same.

As he worked, she began to hum. It was the song from her dream, and she was surprised that she remembered it at all. It began under her breath, quiet and almost a part of the buzz of the TARDIS. Even he, with his well-attuned senses, didn't pick it up at first. That was how it snuck up on him, like a memory that he'd half-forgotten in all of his incarnations. The notes were familiar to him, just as they had been to her, but he had memories - so many memories - associated with the music.

The song flowed out of her easily, and as he worked, she grew louder. She admired him working. He knew what he was doing, and treated the ship gently, as though he could hurt her in some way. Miranda imagined that he could. The ship was more than a ship, after all. More than that, she admired him. His lanky build was torqued to fit into the small space, and she could see the focused look on his features. She decided she rather liked his ears and nose being a bit too big for the rest of his face. She remembered how she used to think of him, when he was fictional and she only knew little bits about him. How she imagined someone admiring just those bits of him. Now, in the present, she blushed. He wasn't fictional.

The Doctor turned when he was nearly done, a look of realization breaking across his face. "How do you know that song?"

She stopped humming, considering the question. "Dunno. I guess I must have heard it before. I was just dreaming about it when I was napping."

He seemed to see her differently for a moment, as though she was not there before. "You dreamt it? When you were asleep in the TARDIS?"

"Well, yeah. But I must have heard it some other time."

"You didn't." He said it with such force of will that she knew it was true, but neither of them offered an alternative explanation. After a weighty silence, he asked a question she didn't want to consider.

"Did you dream anything else?"

"There were some other things, but they were foggy. I really only remember the song."

"I see." She was telling a half-truth, and that was obvious to both of them.

"How do you know the song, Doctor?" She pushed off the wall, and for a moment her balance was tilted forward. He put an arm out to steady her, and she rocked back onto her heels, holding his elbow lightly.

"It's a song for children, when they get scared at night. Back home."

"Gallifrey."

He stared at her. "Yeah. How did you know that?"

"Oh, right. The same way I knew who you were. It's hearsay, I suppose, the way I came by all that. A TV show that I only watched now and again. But some things stick." He didn't respond. "Did someone sing it to you?"

He nodded, his fingers sliding loosely down her arm to her hand. His fingertips traced lines on her palm subconsciously, then settled into the spaces between hers. "My mother sang it to me when I was small. I sang it to my children, once upon a time, too."

She squeezed his hand. "They must have loved that." It had never occurred to her that he'd had children.

She wondered if she should ask him about them. The way he spoke, though, contained so much pain that she was hesitant. Maybe another time, if they trusted one another. She wasn't sure she trusted him. But she didn't like the idea of him hurting.

"I think they did..." He grinned so suddenly that it caught her off guard. "The voice was never quite as nice as yours though. Wanna see the swimming pool?" He tugged at her arm and they started down the hall again, the repair of the door forgotten. She wondered if he'd even finished it. They walked past a garden full of moonflowers - "depending on the time in London, it's either morning glories, 5 o'clocks, or moonflowers," he said - and a room that looked distinctly like a library. She'd have to check on that later.

She felt the humidity rise as they got closer and breathed it in. It was like summer on the beach of Lake Michigan, and she missed it already. She'd only been here, on this ship, with him, a day. Maybe only a few hours. But the realization of her decision's permanence reasserted itself every once in a while. "Here it is! Purest water in existence, right off the planet Ectin. Keep it heated off the TARDIS' circuitry coils. Makes it real nice after a cold planet. There should be a swimming costume in the wardrobe for you."

She smiled brightly at him. "So Doctor, are you a trunks or speedo kind of guy?" She was teasing, but to her surprise, he only stammered a bit and blushed.

"I'll have a to find a pair of swimming shorts somewhere." She laughed and he looked at her defensively. "What? Wasn't like I had anybody around to save from the sight!"

"You're telling me you went skinny dipping?" She was still laughing.

"On my own ship? Of course!" He was looking anywhere but her.

She nudged his shoulder with her own. "Wouldn't want to make you uncomfortable. Maybe I should just adapt to TARDIS tradition, hm?" The blush crept all the way up his ears and she remembered her thoughts from earlier. Now it was her turn to blush. She let go of his hand and turned away from him so he wouldn't see. Give it a minute for the heat to act on her, blame the flush in her skin on that, blame the words on the hangover from whatever she'd breathed in near the factory. She could practically feel his mouth opening and closing as he fished for something to say. Her own mind was racing, attempting to find a reason why she'd said it. Was she flirting with him? What possessed her?

She was on the opposite end of the pool from him, and could feel the warmth of the water as it rose. Space was cold, but at least the pool and the gardens were warm. She'd have to remember that. She thought about taking off her shoes and dangling her feet in, but she didn't feel like dirtying the purest water on the planet with her grime until after she took a shower. "I might take a dip later, after I get a chance to check the wardrobe for a swimsuit." She offered him a friendly smile, nothing more, and he seemed to take it. "But if you could show me where I can clean up? I think this dress might be ruined, though." She frowned down at herself.

"Doubt it. The TARDIS laundry is just amazing. And we can take it to the tailors on Geizhakaro! Now that's a planet, Miranda, that you just have to see to believe – fashion capital of the 4th Great and Bounteous Human Empire! The designs they do there! Well, some aren't exactly comfortable, but still gorgeous. We can get your dress mended there. And any other dresses you might like."

"And swim trunks?" She laughed and scrunched up her nose.

"Those too, I suppose." He blushed again, but met her eye this time, giving her a wink. She felt her heart skip a beat and then do double time. She pulled her hand away in case he could feel it.

"So… the shower?" She quirked an eyebrow in question and he returned very suddenly from his mental trip to Geizhakaro – or wherever else his mind had wandered off to.

"Right! Shower. It's just this way, near your room and all. It's not an en suite or anything – only hospitality ships really have those, but it's comfy and all yours, really."

"You've got your own?"

"Oh, yes! Wouldn't do to have to be trying to share a shower would it?"

She smirked. "No, not at all." He was digging himself such a big hole. They had stopped by a door marked with something that looked like the symbol for the safety shower in her high school chemistry class. "There towels inside?"

"Yep!" He stood there, hands in his pockets, grinning madly. She wrapped her arms around his torso, and after a long minute, he returned the gesture.

"Thanks, Doctor."

"Best thank you I've ever gotten for pointing out the shower," he said cheekily.

"Best location for a shower ever." She pulled away from the hug slowly, glad to see he was still smiling. "I'll be done in a jiffy. Don't do anything crazy without me."

"I'd never!" He faked offense.

She only laughed as she closed the door behind her.


	6. Chapter 6

The Doctor yawned despite himself. He hadn't slept in at least a week, and he was fighting it with all the gumption of a toddler even now. She'd insisted they take a day to just rest, and now they were floating around the moon of a volcanic planet with an intense electromagnetic field that caused the most amazing light show across its surface. She'd pulled out a book of poems to keep herself company as they'd circled lazily in space, the window of the TARDIS showing them what was going on. They were on the dark side of the moon now, with not much to see.

She flipped a page and sighed. He looked up at her, half-asleep already. "Whatcha reading that's got you like that?"

"Just an old poem. In Memorium A.H.H by Alfred, Lord Tennyson. Makes me sigh."

"Read it to me?" He put his arm over her shoulder and pulled her against him slightly. Her weight rested on his shoulder, and she was oddly comfortable.

"If you'd like. It's awfully long though."

"Just pick up where you left off, then." He rested his head on top of hers, his voice growing soft.

She couldn't turn him down. They hadn't been fighting much anymore, and moments like this, where they were almost normal, if not domestic, were becoming more and more common. She made him tea when she made herself coffee and let him cook her dinner that only vaguely resembled food on Earth, but that was ecstatic on the tongue. And now she was sitting on a sofa, watching an electromagnetic storm shudder the entire face of a planet, and reading him Victorian poetry.

"We have but faith: we cannot know;  
For knowledge is of things we see  
And yet we trust it comes from thee,  
A beam in darkness: let it grow.

Let knowledge grow from more to more,  
But more of reverence in us dwell;  
That mind and soul, according well,  
May make one music as before,

But vaster. We are fools and slight;  
We mock thee when we do not fear:  
But help thy foolish ones to bear;  
Help thy vain worlds to bear thy light.

To her surprise, he picked up where she left off, his voice rumbling in his chest and humming into her hair:

"Forgive what seem'd my sin in me;  
What seem'd my worth since I began;  
For merit lives from man to man,  
And not from man, O Lord, to thee."

Forgive my grief for one removed,  
Thy creature, whom I found so fair.  
I trust he lives in thee, and there  
I find him worthier to be loved.

Forgive these wild and wandering cries,  
Confusions of a wasted youth;  
Forgive them where they fail in truth,  
And in thy wisdom make me wise."

He let out a long sigh as well. "You're right. Just has that effect, old Tennyson. Though I'll admit, my favorite of his has always been Charge of the Light Brigade."

She turned her head just slightly to look at him. "You never told me that you were a scholar of Victorian literature."

He yawned again. "You never asked. I know a lot of stuff, me." He gave her a sleepy grin, and she reached up to brush her knuckles against the stubble on his face. He really was endearing.

"Shall we read something happier?"

"Mmm," was all he responded, and she imagined that he'd finally gone to sleep. She closed the book and tucked her hand against his chest, letting herself drift off in the process.

Maybe an hour had gone by – enough for her to call it a nap and for him to call it a good night's sleep. She heard it first, which proved just how tired he was. She stirred him gently, then more insistently as the alarm continued to sound. "Make it stop," she mumbled into his chest.

His eyes snapped open, and he realized that Miranda was tucked against him, her fingers bunching his shirt loosely. He was loathe to move her, but the noise - that particular alarm... He shifted her off of him despite a purr of protest that made his stomach twist and warm. It was an even better reason to get out of there. He was already to the door when she spoke again. "What is it?"

"Mauve," he called back over his shoulder.

She sat there another minute, trying to adjust to the new position, disliking the aloneness of it. Her foggy brain tried to place mauve. It wasn't a signal she'd heard before, and she was fairly certain he hadn't said it in the months they'd been together. God, had it been almost a year? She stretched lazily. Mauve... universal color for distress. It popped into her head suddenly, forcefully, as though other memories were burying it and it just wouldn't have that. Memories from another life. She blinked and got up from the couch.

He was madly pushing buttons, pulling levers, and generally beating on things that otherwise looked like fragile pieces of equipment. She was used to it, and did her best to stay out of his way, leaning nonchalantly on a railing nearby. "Mauve?" she questioned, wiping the last bit of sleep from her eyes. "Universal color for distress, yeah?"

"Exactly! And it's moving at a fantastic speed - 'cept it keeps moving around us - forward, back, in a great big spiral. It's like it's leaving a message. It's fantastic!" He was grinning as he moved around, and she couldn't help but notice that his jumper was still marked where her fingers had been holding it. She sighed, not wanting to admit how hard it was getting to be not to kiss him. But she couldn't. Because Rose hadn't happened, and Rose was so stupidly important in his timeline, at least the bits she knew. And that's how she knew that someday the Doctor would drop her off and leave her. Because she wasn't Rose. Or River. Or Martha or Donna or Amy or Rory or even Clara. Most of them were just names - she'd seen them in episode summaries as she'd flipped through the cable menu, never dreaming they'd  
be important to her someday. She was just a transplant here, and the only mark she should be allowed to leave on the Doctor were those imprints in his jumper.

"Fanstastic, huh?" She dragged herself back to reality. "So this distress beacon keeps circling us. Are we gonna catch it?"

"We might. We just might!" She saw his muscles tense a moment before they hit the ground, just enough time for her to grab hold of the bar behind her. She'd fallen a few times - a few dozen times - before she recognized that unconscious signal that still came through even when his conscious mind was busy blabbing. "And there we are. Let's see where we've gotten to!" He checked the monitor. "Year 1987, Antartica. Well, nothing much happening here. Let's check it out, shall we?"

She pursed her lips. "Can we check it out after I put on a parka? This thin human skin isn't meant to go out there by itself."

He ran his hands down her arms quickly. "Gotta keep you warm!" He put his hand on her back, a familiar move, but considering how deep she'd gotten herself into the thoughts of his attractiveness, it made her warm in an entirely different way. He guided her back to the wardrobe, where he pulled a puffy black jacket with fur lining from a rack. She selected a dark blue one with a drawstring in the hood, pulling it down so it seemed to squish her face. She also found a pair of gloves, fighting the urge to rant at him about superior Time Lord physiology just being a way to make her feel breakable. "Ready!" she squeaked, almost everything obscured by her new outfit, and he laughed. A deep, rolling laugh filled the room. It might have filled the whole TARDIS. She couldn't do anything in the face of that laugh except join in.

When they were done, his hands clasped around her wrist, because her hands were lost in the insulated gloves, he grinned. "Shall we?"

"We shall!" His excitement was catching, and she opened the TARDIS door. Everything was white.

"Should be right here! Right here! We can't even be more than a week behind it. How could it have disappeared?" He was walking to and fro in the icy landscape, scanning for a sign of it. "There should be mauve!"

Her nose was already frozen. This wasn't exactly fun right now, and he could probably have scurried out here in his damn jumper and jacket and been honky dory. She scowled and kicked the snow. He was still narrating, though there didn't seem to be much to narrate in Antarctica in 1987. She dug the tip of her boot into the snow again. It clinked. She did it again, sliding her foot forward across the snow. Clink and swoosh this time. She knelt down and dug around it. Sure enough, Mauve. She couldn't get her fingers around the metal container to clear it off. "Doctor!" She was getting excited. Whatever it was, she'd found it. This was clearly mauve, which wasn't supposed to be in Antarctica in 1987 and she was going to get this stupid piece of mauve out of the snow. She peeled off her gloves, hissing as the cold air swirled around her digits. Too cold. But it would only last a minute.

She plunged her hands into the snow around the mauve object. It was metal - maybe not an earth metal, but metal - and mauve and super ridiculously cold. It had clearly landed before the last batch of snow or wind had covered it over, and it had had plenty of time to drop to temperatures that hurt her fingers as she dug around it. She slipped a hand underneath it to pull it up. "Doctor! I've found it!" She was shouting, but he was pretty far away by this point, trying to use his superior vision to sort out the mauve. She'd found it with her dumb foot. She pulled on it, willing it to move upwards. Instead, her hands slipped, a fact she felt more in her shoulders than her fingers, which were really far too numb already, and saw with the glimpse of blood that spurted .

"Hey now, you shouldn't be taking your gloves off out here. You'll freeze those pretty little fingers off." He looked down and plucked the container from the snow in one deft movement. She pouted beside him, watching her fingers move slowly as they curled around the gloves to take them back inside the TARDIS. At least this had been a short excursion, unlike the heat on Iriapidon 5. She'd nearly had a heat stroke there before the Doctor rectified the gravitational field that was pulling them too close to their sun. Awful stuff. At least you could cover up from the cold. The heat would drain you dry before you realized there was a problem.

The Doctor got inside ahead of her, and she turned away to go warm herself up while he poked and prodded the mauve. She'd begun to just think of it as that, in her head. Not the mauve metal thing or the flying hunk of junk, just the mauve. She was pondering this when she felt him beside her. "Hey now, where do you think you're sneaking off to?" He had already shed his coat and tossed it haphazardly across a pipe and was now coming at her with a concerned look on his face. "You must be half froze, if your fingers are even still attached at all, and don't think I didn't see the line of blood in the snow." He unzipped her coat gently, and she shivered. Not just a small shiver of discomfort, but a full-body tremor that loosened his hand from the zipper pull. "Oh, now that won't do at all."

"I'll be fine Doctor! Always am. You can go tend to your mauve." She started to brush past him, tenatively stretching and bending her fingers within her field of vision. She could still see them moving, so theoretically they still worked fine. She was just going to test them on her zipper when she shrieked and found herself about three feet in the air, looking up at the Doctor's frowning face.

"I'll tend to you first, if you don't mind."

There was no way she was saying she minded at that point. None at all.

#

A/N: This is part one of this chapter. Part two is on the way! Thoughts? Love? Hate? WHAT IS THE MAUVE? WHAT DOES IT MEAN?! (Ok, I know, but hang tight, you'll get there.)


	7. Chapter 7

He washed he blood off her hand in ice cold water, but she felt it as burning hot. He frowned when she hissed in pain. "Shouldn't have taken your gloves off."

"Yeah, it was pretty dumb. But it was frustrating, you know?" She watched the pink rush away in the flowing water, trying to think about something other than her hypothermic hands. She shivered instead, full-body tremor that only made his frown deepen. He rummaged through a nearby cupboard and wrapped her in a blanket. She flipped her hand over in the sink.

"Not a very good reason to do something foolish."

"No? You're a "Do as I say" kind of guy, aren't you, Doctor?" She held in a laugh, but he seemed to understand, chuckling aloud. "Certainly. But I'm the Ninth Wonder of the Universe, me." He looked at her with a grin, and she tried to match it, but her teeth chattered together obnoxiously instead, making him frown again.

He lifted the blanket from her and stepped close behind her. "Need to warm you up." He wrapped he blanket around the two of them, only her arms sticking out so that the gradually warming water could do its work. She had to admit she certainly felt warmer with this new arrangement. It started with every point of contact – his chest against her back, his arms over hers, his thumbs lightly moving back and forth over her forearms. And of course where it settled quite inappropriately just below the pit of her stomach. She changed her mind and decided that the discomfort in her hands was exactly where she needed to concentrate.

She figured it was the TARDIS' doing, that the water was warming in small increments, just enough to keep the blood and feeling returning to her finger without burning her frostbitten skin. She really appreciated the old girl sometimes. She'd taken to anthropomorphizing the TARDIS right along with the Doctor, and sometimes she wondered if the TARDIS really could have been as human as they pretended. She swore that once, in the middle of the night, during one of the Doctor's rare bouts of sleep, she had heard the soul of the TARDIS sigh.

She looked down at her fingers, flexing them as she watched. They were moving at near normal speeds now, and she looked at the finger that had been bleeding. Nothing there. No cut. She felt the Doctor's arms tighten around her just slightly and knew that he had seen the same thing. She lifted her hand out of the water, turning and prodding it to see where the cut had disappeared to. There was nothing – not a single mark on her skin. She frowned. "Just a walking miracle, you are," the Doctor breathed from his position behind her, his lips heartbreakingly close to her shoulder. "How do you feel?"

She swallowed. She could, of course, lie and tell him she was still cold, but they would be stolen moments that didn't really mean what she wanted them to. Besides, at some point he would have the TARDIS do a scan of her and the body temperature readout would give her away. "I'm warmed up now, I think." She loosened the blanket around them, giving him room to go. He lingered for a moment. "I suppose we should check on the mauve? See what it is and who's distressed and all that."

"Right. The mauve!" His voice was enthusiastic, and she smiled along with him, but her stomach did a torturous little flip as he slowly drew his hands back up her arms and over her shoulders, gathering the blanket as he did. He bunched the blanket up and left it on the counter. He took her hand and looked at it again before dragging her out to the control room.

She followed him into the control room, slowly, trying to remember the feel of him being closer behind her, while at the same time berating herself for the attempt. There were obviously more important things to attend to.

It lay exactly where he had left it. There were no flashing lights or displays or even visible openings. It was a mauve cylinder. The Doctor turned it over in his hands. "What do you make of it?"

She moved closer and squinted. "Well, what are these?" She traced a line that was etched into the metal, hidden by dents and scratches from its trip through space. Circles and angles in various positions. The Doctor flipped it over to see what she was talking about.

He stared, face full of disbelief. His hands replaced hers, moving gingerly over the lines. "Can't be," he murmured. "It's not possible." He flipped it over again, his fingers moving with familiarity and precision that startled her. A small beeping noise started from within the mauve itself. It grew louder and louder until Miranda had to cover her ears.

He lifted his hand away, now observing the mauve with a mixture of horror and amazement as it opened. There was almost nothing inside of it. Almost. In fact, if Miranda had been the one looking, she would have written it off as an empty tin can. Instead, the Doctor dropped it in shock, catching it only just before it hit the ground. He was trembling now. She noticed, and that was saying something. "What is it, Doctor? I don't see anything inside." He didn't respond, but his fingers traced over shapes etched into the metal, shapes Miranda didn't recognize. Shapes that TARDIS wasn't translating for her. Impossibly old, perhaps, or… "It's Gallifreyan." His voice cracked, and he looked suddenly shy and weak. This little container full of nothing but language was undoing him. She put her hand on his shoulder, unsure of what else to do.

He pulled back, leaving her hand in the air for a long moment. "This shouldn't be here! This shouldn't exist! There's no way!"

"What is it Doctor?"

"It's a distress signal from another Gallifreyan ship."

"Another TARDIS?"

"Yes. And it brought us to earth. But it doesn't have a tracking signal on it."

"What does that mean?"

"It means it wasn't deployed. Something happened. It's essentially space junk, and we just happened to see it."

"Just happened to? That doesn't seem quite possible, Doctor. There are no coincidences, not this big."

"There are coincidences all the time. Haven't you been paying attention? All sorts of things are just eerily similar." His fingers were still tracing over the letters.

"What does it say?"

"It's the name of the ship. The name of the manufacturer. Instructions for whoever finds it."

"So what are we supposed to do?"

He choked, as if his own words bubbling up had constricted his throat. "We do nothing."

"Nothing? How do we do nothing? We found a distress signal from your planet, and we're going to do nothing?"

"There's nothing to DO!" he shouted at her.

Now it was her turn to be quiet. She shied away in the face of his anger – the Oncoming Storm, indeed. "There's nothing to do, Miranda. Don't you understand that? Don't you understand there is no planet to track this back to? There are no ships. There are no Time Lords. There are no more TARDISes. There's just me and this ship alone in the entirety of time and space!" His anger was palpable and it filled the entire cabin. And then it collapsed. A reaction that left only grief in its wake. Her heart broke with his. "There's no one else. This shouldn't be here. There's just me. Gallifrey is gone."

He turned his eyes to her, and she had never seen him so lost. "Gallifrey is gone, and I did it." She knew somehow. He didn't understand, but he saw it in her eyes. Maybe it was from the TV shows she talked about sometimes, but it was there. She knew, or at least he hoped she did. If she didn't know, then at least she understood. She didn't say anything, but she rested her hand on his arm lightly. He slid his arm up, taking her hand in his, clutching them to his chest.

"They were all there one minute. All of them. And then they were gone. The Time Lords. Daleks. All of the evils that both armies had created… They were trampling over each other in the last day of the last Great Time War. And it was going to spread out to the rest of the universe and destroy it. I couldn't let that happen. I couldn't let it destroy everything. I tried to stop… I tried. There was nothing else that could have been done."

She'd never been a very good Catholic growing up, but she did remember confession, and she suddenly felt like the priest. She just didn't know how to give him absolution. "Doctor…" She let him grieve. She didn't say anything more. When he finally put down the container, setting it gently on the console, and took both her hands in his, she welcomed him. She opened her arms and let him fall into them. He didn't cry. She wondered if he was even capable of crying anymore, or if Time Lords ever were. But his breathing was ragged, and it seemed to comfort him to be there with her. To listen to her single strong heartbeat ring his ears. And each breath of hers was smooth and full in contrast to his stuttering half-breaths. Memories were raging through his head, memories he had tried very hard to forget. Now they had followed the container, this piece of space junk, to the last place he called a refuge.

"There's nowhere to go, nothing to look into, nothing to do. There's no way to get to Gallifrey. No way. I don't know that there's anyone else that understands that feeling. To have chosen to sacrifice an entire world."

"To never be able to go home again, because you chose something else." Her words were so soft that she wasn't sure she'd spoken them. She half-hoped they were in her head. She hadn't meant to say them, hadn't meant to compare them, to hold her grief up to his, where it was so thin and pale. But she'd said it, and when his eyes found hers, she regretted it a little less.

"I took you from your world," he said finally.

"No," she said softly. Suddenly desperate to make him understand that he didn't have to carry her choices on his shoulders. "You didn't take me from anywhere. I picked this. Over everything else. I chose this life. I chose life with you, Doctor." She sighed, placing her lips briefly on his forehead. "And I don't regret it."

"I didn't do anything to deserve you. Everything I've done should drive you away screaming."

"And where would I go? There's nowhere in any universe that I would rather be. I don't know if I'll ever make you understand that, but it's true." Her lips brushed against his short hair as she spoke, and he sighed at the feeling. There was a time, after the Moment, that he was sure no one would ever want to touch someone so stained with death again. He didn't even want to be himself. He'd jetted off into the blackness of space. Far away from the dead sun, from the world wrapped in itself, wrapped in its own time, and tried to pretend that he hadn't killed all of them. Tried to pretend that his hand hadn't ended an entire world and more species than most humans could name. He tried to pretend, and when he was finally done pretending, he'd gotten lost.

Lost in another dimension, where he'd picked up a girl who could never understand him. But he realized then that he would never understand her, not really. He realized that he had stolen her home from her – given her an offer that was too good to refuse without explaining the consequences. And she wanted to help him. She wanted to make him feel better. She wanted to take away his pain. He shifted, changing their hold from the maternal comforter to two equals. He caught her eye. "Remind me, again, why you stay."

Her heart froze. There was answer that came immediately, an answer she wanted desperately to give, but didn't think she could. She swallowed it back. It was bitter on the way down. And she tried to find another way to say it, another way that wouldn't put the pressure of those words on him. She fell short. And all she could do was breathe a sigh that he seemed to take into himself. He closed his eyes and took a deep breath. "Thank you, Miranda. Miranda Larsen."

The words of her name sounded new on his lips just then. They sounded like they were meant to say something else that in his head was so linked with her name that it was its own meaning. It gave her hope and made her smile. "I'm not going to leave you alone, you know. No matter what time or space, I'll be there if you need me."

"That's a big promise to make. Bigger than you can possibly keep."

She knew though, she would do everything in her power to keep it. If she could shift galaxies or universes, twist time – she would do it for him. She didn't respond to his challenge, but silently reaffirmed it to herself.

"You're quite the creature, you know that?"

"Quite the creature?"

"A beautiful young girl with all your life ahead of you, but you cling to this crazy old man with a daft old face. To make him feel better."

"That's not why I do it…"

"That's not what I'm saying, Miranda." He held her back from him, enough he could see her face. "I don't know what I'd do right now if I hadn't found you."

"Oh, you'd probably be gallivanting across the universe having picked up a supermodel somewhere."

"Nah, don't need supermodels. Besides, I don't think they'd know nearly as much about the universe and poetry." He kissed her, and she wasn't expecting it. She oscillated for a moment between responding and pulling away. He was obviously only doing this because he was hurt. She shouldn't want this as much as she did. She shouldn't want him as much as she did.

She stopped that thought where it came from. It wasn't something she could say, it wasn't something she could even feel. But she didn't shove him away, and the kiss was so tender and soft that it almost made her cry. Instead she kissed him back. When they parted a moment later, his breathing was ragged and uneven again. There was still too much grief in the air for anything more than that one chaste kiss, but all the same, some kind of barrier had been broken. Some kind of line had been crossed and they both knew it.

She twined her fingers in his. "Come on."

"Where are we going?"

"To the stars."

He'd told her about a protocol that would take her to earth's moon to just circle. A place to think. A place to go in case something went wrong. A safe place where he could recover. She hit that button now. "You should get some rest, Doctor. You didn't get nearly enough." There was fear in his eyes. "I'll be there. I'll do what I can to fight off nightmares, ok?" He squeezed her hand tighter as they wandered back toward the viewing room. He sat on the sofa, laying back, bringing her hand with him, pulling her down to tuck her body up against his in not an entirely new position, but with entirely new meaning.

Tonight was for his dreams, his grief, his memories, and she would do what she could to ward off bad dreams. She wasn't a telepath of course, but she would try. But in the morning when they awoke, their fingers still twined together, and his leg tucked between hers, something had changed, irrevocably. The wall between her universe and his was impenetrable; Gallifrey was gone. And the Doctor would have done anything to never, ever lose her. But as far as that went, he didn't end up with much of a choice.


	8. Chapter 8

She woke first, slipping away from him while he slept. There had been nightmares, of course, both hers and his. As she stood up, she made sure that his brow was free from the tell-tale creases. He wasn't talking in his sleep, and his grip on her was loose. She brushed her fingers lightly over his forehead and smiled tiredly. At least he was getting rest.

She stopped on her way to the kitchen to change her clothes. Time seemed so strange here that it had stopped seeming abnormal - there were no proper days, minutes, or hours since they never stayed in a solar system very long. The Doctor could tell her in Earth time whenever she asked, but she'd stopped asking. It had stopped being important.

She had tucked her hair back in a ponytail and slipped on a plain t-shirt and jeans. There was a part of her that wanted to look pretty and go the extra mile - the part of her that still acutely felt the Doctor's lips on hers - but she pushed it away. She would be plain, she would be herself, and his grief would pass and they wouldn't have to speak of it. He hadn't meant it. Every moment, awake or asleep, convinced her more and more of that.

She stepped into the kitchen and put hot water on. She'd started drinking tea along with the Doctor. Strong black tea that dried the back of her tongue a bit from the tannins. She still had coffee - the Doctor humored her with an occasional trip to get the finest coffee in the universe, he'd said. It was from a different place each time. She'd laughed at that.

She leaned against the counter, waiting for the tea to finish. She'd had nightmares, too. It seemed the distress beacon had swept in the Doctor's past. She'd felt his arms tighten around her when he slept, when his lips muttered things she didn't understand - Gallifreyan, the one tongue she knew the TARDIS didn't translate for her. She'd tried to stay calm for him, but as sleep claimed her, even her dreams were troubled.

It was the same vision of darkness that she'd had on her first night in the TARDIS. Darkness lit by the dim shadow of dying flames. And the voice: "This is too much - too many horrors have been unleashed. It has to be stopped somehow...I have to stop it. I have to fix what we've done." The voice had started out as a strangers, a softness she didn't recognize, but as it repeated itself, it became the voice she now knew best. It was the Doctor's - her Doctor's, repeating it as a justification for something already done.

What frightened her now, as she carried the steaming mugs of tea back to where the Doctor was sleeping, was that she recognized the Doctor's sleep mumblings as the very same words. And those had been the dreams she understood best. There were others, more vivid, almost not dreams at all. Or at least not her dreams.

The moon, still larger than life in the window as they slowly circled, loomed over her. They were on the dark side of the moon now, and she stood for a moment to admire this view that almost no one on earth would see, at least not in her lifetime. Well, not her natural lifetime. So many things wouldn't exist in her natural lifetime that she'd already seen.

She sat gently in the space she'd vacated earlier, where the Doctor's body had accommodated for hers on the sofa. She was perched there, on the edge of the couch, despite the fact there were half a dozen other places to sit. She put his tea on the table at the end near his head and clutched her own mug against her chest, breathing it in. She was glad he was sleeping. That the nightmares seemed to be leaving him alone. Nightmares of darkness and fire and guilt and grief and oh-so-much loneliness. She felt that in her bones, the loneliness. It was why she was sitting so close to him now. She wasn't going anywhere.

His arm wrapped around her, pulling himself slowly up to a sitting position behind her. His head rested in the space between her shoulder blades, and she gave him a minute to gather himself. It felt comfortable, his breathing in time with the filling of her lungs. She sat still, savoring the moment.

After a long moment, his head moved up to her shoulder. "You're up early." He breathed in deeply. "And you made tea."

"Got a cup for you, too." She stretched out her arm and brought the mug close to her side where he would be able to grab it. He took it from her, but held his arm there. With his head on her shoulder and his arm wrapped around her side, it was all she could do to sip calmly at her tea.

"Not coffee?"

"Nope."

She felt him shuffle around until he was sitting mostly beside her, taking a sip of the tea before looking at her seriously. "What's wrong, then?" He paused, waiting for her to answer. She took too long gathering her thoughts, however, and she felt him tense. "Last night, you were fantastic," he said softly. "I wasn't at my best and all that. You were more than I could have asked for." He took another deep breath over his cup of tea. "Still more than I can ask for."

She turned her head slightly so she could see him out the corner of her eye. "What are friends for?" She smiled weakly at him.

"Right. Friends. Fantastic friends." He gave her that grin, the one she could feel brighten the room whenever he used it. The air caught in her throat and she choked a little. It was the last thing she wanted to do, because his expression changed.

He didn't say anything, waiting instead for her to respond. She set her tea down, afraid her shaking hands would spill it. She'd learned to take risks since being with the Doctor. But this... she had a sudden image of herself watching the TARDIS fade away for the last time, leaving her to make a new life without him, and it hurt. She wanted to stay with him, wanted to be with him. And if he was jerking her around right now, with all this emotion and holding her close and even last night's kiss, well, she wanted all of that. She sighed and leaned back into him slightly. "You are so going to toss me out into space for this."

His mouth started to form a response, "For what?," when she pressed her lips to his. It was an awkward angle, her head tilted back and to the side to get close enough to him. She tried to stop herself from thinking, from imagining the consequences which were far too close for her liking. Instead she turned into him, bringing her hand to his chest to steady herself. Another part of her brain was delighted with how good a kisser he was. Still another was noticing that he had set his tea down. And another was thinking she had waited for too long to do this.

All of that thinking prevented her from noticing the Doctor hearts speeding up. From feeling his hand at the middle of her back. From realizing that his relief was as palpable as her worry.

She did, however, notice the small groan that slipped from his lips. Her eyes snapped open and she pulled back, taking a shaky breath. Her body was facing his now, and his hand pressed into her back, holding her in place. "For that," she managed. "Sorry. I mean, I'm not really sorry. I wanted to do it. But I understand if you aren't, I mean, if you don't want to be..."

"You're getting as bad as me, with all your talking." She smiled abashedly, and he answered with a grin. "But you are really brilliant, Miranda. Really. Very. Fantastic." He punctuated each of the last three words with a soft kiss first on her forehead, then her nose, then her lips. He pulled her with him to recline on the sofa. Her body felt comfortable against his, and she snuggled closer against him. All that worry and waiting, and what for?

"I dreamt of you last night." The words came from out of nowhere, into their comfortable silence.

"Yeah? Good things?"

He didn't answer her question, and she could almost hear his thoughts turning over and over in his head. "I was on Gallifrey. Red plains, birds singing, schlenk blossoms in flower, the suns burning beautifully above us." She tilted her head to look back at him. "We were sitting there on the plains at first. In a spot I used to go to as a child. Used to catch flutterwings – like butterflies – on the slopes of the mountain when I was just a Time Tot." He smiled vaguely, and he knew the memory should have been only for him, if she hadn't seen it the night before, too.

"We were just there, on the plains, enjoying a little downtime. It was good for the soul. And then…"

He was struggling for words. Each attempt at describing what he'd seen when dream turned to nightmare brought another look of searing pain to his face. It twisted her heart painfully, and she laid her fingertips lightly on his lips. "I dreamt it with you."

He stared at her, pain and disbelief warring in his eyes. "You saw it? The fire and darkness and…" His grip on her tightened as he sought physical reassurance from her.

"I saw the red plains and the orange sky, the sun rising in the south and making the mountains glow. I saw the snow at the top of the mountains and rested under a silver-leafed tree that reflected the morning sun until it looked like the whole forest was aflame. I saw a lake filled with fish that could sing. And the best part? I saw you smile. I saw the weight come off your shoulders. It was wonderful." She moved her fingers over his hand, tracing their shape, sliding over each knuckle. She wanted him to relax and forget the rest of the dream, but she knew he was waiting, needing to hear if she'd been plunged into the same hellish landscape as he had.

"I saw the war. The Dalek ships crashing against the Panopticon. The fire and darkness. I saw a world that wasn't what it once was – a world that was trapped in a war that could never end. And then it was like... walking in shadow." She saw something pass across his face, but wasn't really sure what it was. "The fire and darkness got so big… so overpowering… I turned to you, to find you…" To save you, she added mentally, starting to cry. "And then there was this room, it felt like the TARDIS…" She stopped, feeling him shaking. She rolled over to face him. He should have been crying – she wondered if Time Lords could cry, or if he'd simply used up all his tears.

She rested her hand on the side of his jaw and gently ran her thumb over his cheek. She tried to think of how to end her description, but he broke the silence, holding her hand to his face.

"I've had that dream a million times. Every time I see the same things. I thought when you were there, on the planet with me, that it wouldn't have to be that way, but you saw it, you stood in that dream with me. And… you changed it." He pressed a kiss to her palm. "When I had to push that button, it was the loneliest moment in the universe. I was destroying everything I loved to save everything else. And I thought no one could ever understand. But you were there this time, really there, not just a product of my daft brain." He looked into her eyes and she lost her breath. "When I had to push the button this time, you held my hand. You pushed it with me, didn't you?"

She didn't say anything. She didn't have to. They both knew that her dream self had wanted to save him from himself, and the only way she knew how was to bear up under half the burden. And there was nothing left to say. He pulled her close against him and she held him tight. They needed each other in that moment. And for now, that was enough.


	9. Chapter 9

"Fishing!"

She looked over her book at him, skepticism written plainly over her face. "Fishing?" She tried to fix him with a glare, but his grin was contagious. Finally, she cracked, a chuckle escaping her lips as she set down her book – A Brief History of the Martian Empire: Red Jewel of Sol. She was certain the book wasn't written in English, or any other Earth language, but the TARDIS was doing a fine job for her. "You want to take me fishing?"

"Well yeah! Sky fishing on the sea-plains of Aruenta. Like nothing you've ever seen before – the sea-plains are full of blue grass…"

"What is this gonna be like Deliverance? Full of bluegrass?" She hummed the twanging refrain from that movie, but quit when the joke was apparently lost on the Doctor. "Blue grass. Ok."

He frowned, trying to understand her reference, but got over it in short order. "And the grass is taller than you, and the sky fish live there – levitating creatures that look like huge flying bluegill or perch or trout. There are exotic ones too, but really only the most daring sportsmen go after the Filoterins. Big, mean things, they are."

"And we're not the most daring sportsmen?" When he only opened and closed his mouth, she tossed the book at him lightly, watching him dance easily out of the way. "So what does one wear to fish for flying Filoterins?"

"To fish for flying Filoterins, I find it fun to fenangle fancy frocks for females and fine fedoras for men." He picked up the book and walked it back to the table next to wear she was sitting, grinning from ear to ear.

"Yeah? For flying fish like Filoterins, fine folk wear fuzzy fezzes, I find." She stood up, stretching up in her tiptoes and moving muscles that had fallen asleep while she was reading. Her looped hands fell down loosely over his head, pulling him close to her.

"Fezzes? Heaven forfend! More finely, fuzzy fezzes are frightening." He rested one hand on her hip, his grin still firmly in place.

"Hmm. Fuzzy fezzes are fun, in my philosophy."

"Fine." He leaned close. "But there are more things in heaven and on earth than are dreamt of in your philosophy."

She tilted her head back and laughed loudly. "My philosophy? Well sure. No amount of my philosophy can even vaguely show me all the things you've taken me to see. The slug people? God, you know how well I took that."

"Not terribly."

"Stop humoring me, Doctor." She stepped back, sliding down the couch's curved front like an invertebrate. "Great glopping massive hulks of grey goo, they were. Like overgrown escargot. But they're the best singers in the universe." As she spoke, she slid slowly down, curving down into a hunched-over pool on the floor. "But I was too busy making slug jokes, til you, um, made me listen."

"I made you listen?"

"Like you don't remember, Mr. Casanova. Scientific demonstration of humanoid interaction my behind."

"I didn't demonstrate any interactions with your behind. I thought that would be a bit much for the very conservative natives."

She guffawed. "As it was, didn't you tell them that we were sharing songs between the two of us? You're lucky I can sing."

"You saying I can't?"

"No such words ever crossed my lips. Just like no discernible melody has crossed yours."

"You wound me, Miranda, my dear." He clutched his hand over his double heartbeat. "I can sing."

"Just like you're a doctor."

"I am a doctor. A very impressive one. Studied medicine at Seelian II's medical school - the finest in the galaxy. Not to mention a degree from Oxford in medicine. Impressive enough for you?"

"So impressive. 19th century medicine and the ability to practice on cat people. Good show." She smirked at him, teasing.

"Stomping on a wounded man's pride now, that's low." He sat heavily in the seat behind him.

"Well prove it then."

"Prove it? Prove what?"

"That you can sing. Or that you're a medical doctor, and don't just have a PhD in Cheesemaking."

"That was an excellent course of study, I'll have you know."

"I'll bet it was, _Doctor_." She emphasized the last word and sat on his lap. It was familiar and fun, something she would have done with a boyfriend back home, but she brushed that thought aside. She brushed a lot of thoughts aside, as she was now in direct contact with him, and direct contact was the time she was most likely to slip, as far as their mental connection went. Or maybe he was slipping. It was hard to tell sometimes, between the two of them. "So prove it."

He began to hum a few bars, and she could feel his chest rumble against her with the deep notes. She let it vibrate through her and relaxed into him a bit as he stroked her hair and hummed. She recognized the lullaby that she heard in her own sleep, the one that he had once told her he used to sing to his own children, and a long breath escaped her as the long tones became words she didn't recognize. She had never heard the words before, except in her dream, and it was changing something. She didn't understand it, but she could practically feel the import of the words against her skin as he traced shapes she didn't know onto the palm of her hand.

He quieted, and she tilted her head up to press a chaste kiss against his lips. "Ok, so you can sing," she whispered, not quite wanting to ruin the moment, but knowing it was bound to end soon anyway.

"I can that."

"Still haven't shown your doctoring skills."

"Haven't I?" He held up her own hand, bringing back the memories of burns and scars that had healed far quicker than natural.

"Nanogenes were lucky."

"It's better to be lucky than good, I always say."

"Always? Funny, I've never heard you say it before."

"Well, I think it an awful lot."

"And you expect me to read your thoughts?"

"It was one of my favorite experiences when you did." That lingered in the air for a bit, until she stood up and offered him her hand.

"Come on then."

"Where are we going?"

"The wardrobe, of course. Gotta find fuzzy fezzes and frilly frocks. Or whatever one actually wears to go sky fishing." She winked at him and he followed her out of the room, shaking his head happily.

"How long you gonna stay with me?"

She pursed her lips, considering some options for sky fishing, finally settling on an answer. "Oh, you know, I was thinking about forever. How's that sound?"

"Sounds fantastic!" He turned to grin at her, but sputtered when a fez hit him square in the nose. "Oi!"

Miranda bent double laughing when a fedora was flung like a frisbee at her head, where it bounced lightly and landed at her feet. "Hey now! Watch where you're tossing stuff!"

"You just pegged me with a fez!"

"Fezzes are cool!" She defended herself by plucking it up off the floor and placing it atop her head. "See?"

"Yeah, I see." He was chuckling, a deep sound that was contagious."But really, let's get changed so we can get out there. Filoterins aren't going to catch themselves! Well, I mean, they occasionally wander into forests and get caught on a branch, especially the ones with whiskers. Unfortunate, that."

"So, jeans and a tshirt ok? Practical shoes, yeah? Course, I always need practical shoes when I'm out with you. Never know when I'm going to be running for my life."

"Hey, it's not like I'm in trainers!"

"I've only seen you out of the combat boots, jeans, jumper, and jacket for 2 reasons."

"And if I recall, you practically begged for a dance."

She quirked an eyebrow as she slid into a blue t-shirt and shrugged on a black leather jacket to match his. She wouldn't admit to him that she liked having a similar look to him, and he hadn't yet called her on it. "Dancing? Is that what the kids call it these days?"

"Oi, little girl, I was talking about the masque on Venus!"

She stuck her tongue out. "Oh yeah. That."

"You've got a dirty mind, you."

"Yep. You like it."

He mumbled something to himself, but didn't offer a comeback. Because after all, he did. "You look nice. For a human."

"Not so bad yourself. For a humanoid."

He caught the small of her back and swept her lightly out of the wardrobe. "You know, before humans had developed a coherent language with prefixes and suffixes like -oid, humans were known in more refined circles as a type of being related to Time Lords. Actually, in Gallifreyan, it would probably translate best as 'little wannabe Time Lords.'"

She turned, bumping the TARDIS door open with her hip and facing him. "Wannabe Time Lords? A great big fancy civilization like the Time Lords called an ENTIRE segment of the universe's population wannabes?"

"We invented gravity, Miranda! How could we not see your bloated little baby heads as wannabes?"

"Our heads were bloated? Geez. Yours were so big that when you died it created black holes, huh? You know, implosion of a supernova?"

"Almost there with the science jokes."

"Well, at least humans kept being able to procreate. No curse of Pythia on earth, mister."

"Doctor, you know. And it's just so messy..."

"Mmhmm. Not what you usually say. Though it's kinda the truth. But, to risk sounding repetitive, you like it. A lot."

The Doctor paused, and she stopped suddenly. She hadn't stopped once, and had taken a nice little tumble down a dirt embankment. She wasn't much worse for the wear, but she'd learned, if she was walking backwards while talking to him, to stop when he did. And to turn around.

She was glad she did. They were parked at the edge of a forest of silver-barked trees, the green leaves reaching up for ages over the plain below. Tall grasses undulated and swayed in the wind, each little breeze eddying through the blades and making it look almost liquid - these must be the sea-plains. She could see fish floating among the tops of the grass leaves, big ones, little ones, familiar looking ones, and ones altogether foreign. "Wow," she breathed. "Seven years with you and you still manage to impress me."

"That's cause I'm impressive."

"Yeah. That's it." She took his hand and bumped shoulders with him. "So. Sky fishing. Where do we get the poles? Do you fish with poles? Or what?"

He grinned and tugged on her hand. "Let's go see, shall we?"


	10. Chapter 10

They'd landed upon this rock - meteor, the Doctor had corrected her - too long ago for her wandering feet. He was occupied with some tinkering with the TARDIS. That was a task she'd learned long ago not to help with. That was his private time with the TARDIS, and she happily gave it to him. After all, the TARDIS was with him long before she arrived, and would be with him long after. She could accept that, at least. So she'd gone out for a walk.

"Just be careful out there. The scanners aren't picking up any life forms, but you never really know what could happen." She'd shrugged it off as a typical warning, tested the temperature and left her jacket on the railing before starting out. Now, just out of sight of the TARDIS from where she stood behind a rock outcropping, she was stopped in her tracks.

She blinked, trying to clear her eyes of dust and debris so she could be sure of what she was seeing. Because she needed to be sure. There was a low buzzing in the back of her head - their TARDIS - but in front of her was the spastic static of a television channel that just couldn't tune in. It wasn't just the sound in her head though: the actual thing in front of her was flickering. One moment a rock, then a tree, then a metal spike, then a small car, then a merchant's tent from the perpetual market on Kava, then the familiar shape of a blue phone box. As the buzzing in her head got louder, it seemed that the thing in front of her picked up on it, too, and the blue box appeared more and more often in the rotation of random shapes that paraded in front of her.

"Malfunctioning chameleon circuit," she heard herself mutter. Not a jammed or broken one, like the one on their TARDIS, which was jammed on that shape mostly because the Doctor liked it, but a chameleon circuit that was in its last gasping breaths. It was locking onto the signal most native to it and trying to adapt. It seemed to be stabilizing on the blue police box. And for a long moment, both ships looked exactly the same.

She knew the Doctor would tell her not to go in, to stay out of such an unstable ship, especially a TARDIS. If she went in, it could materialize somewhere he couldn't go to get her. And she knew that.

But she also knew that the Doctor would go in, no, he would rush in. He would tell her to stay there - a much safer proposition now that she knew how to fly the TARDIS - and sonic his way into the control room of another Time Lord's ship, exploring the mysteries of it. If he had found it first, he would have done just that.

But she had found it. And he was still in their TARDIS, tinkering with something. He was always tinkering with something. It calmed him down. And after the nightmares of the previous evening, he needed some calm.

So she didn't call for him to join her in her tentative exploration. She told herself that he needed time to himself. But she knew, from that faint buzz of their TARDIS in the back of her mind, that there would be too many unanswered questions if they went in together. She might know things she shouldn't. Worse, she might say them out loud.

The door to this duplicate blue box creaked as it opened, but the interior of the ship was terrifyingly quiet. The desktop theme was not the same as their TARDIS, but she recognized the control room all the same. Not many TARDISes were set up with entry directly into the control room. It was part of the ships dying attempt to mimic a living ship. This one wasn't even a Type 40, she realized, examining the console. It was newer, but harder used. Someone didn't care for their ship the same way the Doctor did.

Which brought her to the more immediate question: how had this TARDIS gotten here, and where was its pilot? There was a layer of dust on the console, and the buzz of this TARDIS was growing louder and more frantic in her head. It was competing with the familiar low buzz of their TARDIS in her mind, and the result was almost deafening. She looked around for any sort of clue - anything that might tip her off as to the identity of the Time Lord that had left this behind. Why here, on this rock with only ruins and no surviving civilizations? Why had it been left behind? What sort of Time Lord would leave their TARDIS? Or what sort of fate had befallen him so he couldn't leave this place?

She began to get a queasy feeling in her stomach, doubting her decision to come in here on her own. Her hand reached out, seemingly of its own accord, and touched the helmic regulator. It settled comfortably in her palm at first, feeling just like the one she was so familiar with. She wondered if she could fix this one up, perhaps to have as a spare car of sorts - keep it in their TARDIS's garage to pull out when things needed fixed.

The feel of metal and glass cracking under her touch registered a moment too slowly. What she felt instead was fire and knives - the console was exploding as the TARDIS died. She fell to the floor, a metal grate that bit into her skin with the force of impact, and looked back at where she had just been.

And there, looking back into her, was the Heart of the TARDIS.

It swirled in her head like a million trillion galaxies all coming together in a strange sort of entropic dance. It was golden, and streaks of blue and silver and every color she could name and so many more that she couldn't. It was overwhelming - she was going to drown in this space, even if a small part of her argued that it was only in her head. She was going to drown in her own mind. She was giddy at the thought of dying, as though it made sense and was amusing that she had never seen it this way before. Of course she died here - and the Doctor mourned her along with all the others he had lost, but carried on. Picked up new companions. Saved worlds she hadn't yet heard of. Had unnameable adventures.

No, she would live through this, but the scars would make her too slow for him, too hard to handle. He would leave her somewhere safe, somewhere that she could spend her too-long convalescence looking out at the stars and cursing the burns on her body and the brokenness of her mind for having to let him go.

Still wrong. The TARDIS - her TARDIS, would come to her aid, help heal her from this mess. It would purge the problem - the Time Vortex itself? - from her body, and the ship would integrate the extra power, and life would continue on as normal with Miranda Larsen and the Doctor in the TARDIS.

She locked onto the Doctor, the only constant in all of this swirling madness. She could feel the deluge encroaching on her soul, or what she imagined to be her soul - that part of her mind that was so distinctly her that any change to it would fundamentally alter things.

She thought of him in their TARDIS, busy fixing something with his sonic screwdriver, and noted each nanosecond that passed between the time he dropped to the moment it hit the grate below. He knew something was wrong, she mused. He knew, and was coming for her. She focused on him, and as she did a line seemed to extend from him - one backwards, and a million different ones forward. She traced a few of them in her mind. In one, the Doctor was dying, alone, on a planet filled with rolling pepper pots - Daleks, she thought. She retreated from that one hastily. In another, she and he were marooned on a beautiful planet, with all the amenities she could want. A home, the Doctor by her side, and she seemed happy. She lingered there, on that time line, the one where the TARDIS had been stolen from them by angels in the cemetery but it was alright, because they were together. But he was sad and burdened by something she didn't understand, but she could feel his hurt even in this hypothetical future.

She considered for a moment, but left that one behind, too. She hopped from thread to thread like an exploring spider, envisioning every future for him. Some included her - those were the ones she liked. Others did not. She did not linger on those.

Finally she came upon one, and she was there. She survived this barrage of time and space and became more like him. She bore the pain, both physical and emotional, daily, but she returned to their TARDIS where they took to the stars. Pleased, she jumped forward further in time. Here though, there was a young blonde girl. Rose, her now-infinite mind named her. Strange, since the Doctor's first companion was named Rose in Gallifreyan. Susan in English. Rose. And Rose made the Doctor smile, and Miranda thanked her for that. Rose saw this thing, this deluge, too. She was a goddess for a moment. She hopped forward again. Still Rose, though the Doctor had a new face. Regenerated, she supplied to herself. Bad wolf. The Doctor loved Rose. Miranda's heart clenched, and she hopped forward again. The Doctor with a young human doctor, desperately in love with him. The Doctor not remembering anyone before Rose... not remembering her. Donna Noble. Adam. Jack Harkness. Amelia Pond. Rory Williams. Clara Oswin, or Oswald? Stone angels, rolling pepper pots, evil tin men, lizard people, and creatures in suits that she only remembered with the part of her mind that flowed over the entirety of the universe. And then, at the end, at the very end, she reappeared.

She understood then. She could choose how hard to fight, and it would change everything. She could succumb to the burning pain that was beginning to pulse through her with each wave of color. All of time and space was screaming in her head. She could hear a child giggling on the swing, a soldier dying in battle, a father reading a bedtime story, a scientist burning his skin with a drop of spilled acid, a temp deciding to turn left instead of listening to her mother, a concerned woman making tea - and that was just the Earth timeline. They were all there - world's she'd never seen, and never would see in person, timelines that existed and could exist. All that ever was, all that is, and all that could be. She was spiraling through it all, and it was consuming her.

"Miranda!" She heard the Doctor's voice and opened her eyes. She could see herself reflected in his blue orbs - her eyes were a roiling, molten gold. She opened her mouth to speak, and traces of the same gold spilled out with her breath. "You're gonna burn! You've got to let it go!"

And in that moment, she made her choice. She let go. It rushed out of her in streaks of blue and gold and silver, brushing affectionately against the Doctor as it streamed out the door of this broken TARDIS and toward their own, which she could hear in the back of her mind calling it to her, as though welcoming a lost sister. And then it was gone. The space in her mind that had been filled with the Time Vortex was suddenly glaringly empty. Her sense were too small - too big? - for her mind now. There was so much space inside her. So much bigger on the inside.

She felt the Doctor's arms underneath her as he lifted her gently. There were cuts and burns across her face and arms, she knew. Blood smeared lazily across his jacket where she wrapped her arm around him. Her throat was parched and she could find no voice with which to speak. She rested her head against him, feeling so small and so big, this paradox of knowing everything and nothing. It was exhausting.

In the medical bay, she retained enough sense of her surroundings to know, somehow, that she had chosen. She was still too disjointed to know quite what she had chosen, but so far it included her being alive and the Doctor being near her and that he would be ok. She knew that. She forgot the rest for now, but knew he was ok. That was the most important thing. Her dry lips may have been repeating that, but there was no way for her to know. The nanogenes were doing their work on her, more work than they'd ever been asked to do. She found herself vaguely disappointed that after all that she wouldn't even get to have a scar to mark the occasion. She didn't the Doctor would mind scars. She knew he had a few from battle. She'd traced them with her fingertips. She liked that feeling, and the way it made him take in a startled little breath.

She understood that her thoughts were small, but they seemed appropriately sized for now. The nanogenes were working, and the Doctor was saying something to her. She couldn't understand him. She blinked. She could see the worry lines etched on his face now, the same ones that deepened during nightmares. It occurred to her that this was the stuff his nightmares were made of, and it made her sad to know she had caused it. She tried to focus on what he was saying. It must be important. What do you say to someone you fear might die? She wasn't going to die of course. She had seen when she was going to die, and this wasn't it. She had so much of her life left to carry on with. But he didn't know that.

She tried to focus on him again. Watched his lips as they mumbled something incoherent. Gallifreyan? As soon as she thought it, it began to piece itself together in her head. Gallifreyan. Don't leave me. Don't leave me. I need you to come back to me. You promised you'd always come back.

They were the ramblings of a desperate boy, a lost boy. And she knew what she had promised him. It had been a big promise even then. Now, having seen everything, she understood its scope for the first time, the way he must have understood it when she first uttered the words. She blinked again.

"I'm not going anywhere, Doctor." Her voice sounded raspy and thick even to her, a sound creaked out from the back of a cave, rather than her own small throat. His eyes met hers, looking at her hands where the cuts had been and sighing with relief. The nanogenes were working. They weren't dead and used up on little things, as he'd feared. They would mend her and bring her back to rights.

"Except to sleep." His voice was calmer now, and as his rough fingers brushed over the back of her hand, examining her new skin, he tried to send some of that through to her. Her mind, still gaping at the loss of the Time Vortex, was open to receive him. Calm flooded through her, and something else she couldn't quite find a name for in English. Parts of her mind that had previously been unused sparked to life, trying to provide other words in other languages that might help her. She brushed them aside, choosing instead to call it the feeling the Doctor gave her. It was true and uncomplicated. And she slept.


	11. Chapter 11

The Doctor had given her medicine, what little bit he had aboard, to make her sleep. He hated it, because he wanted to be constantly reassured that she was well, that she would recover. He had stepped away only once since he'd carried her back on board, and that was to take them somewhere else, somewhere away from the volatile little moon that had almost cost him what he was not yet willing to pay. Between the physical wounds and the mental strain, she should be dead. He held her newly-patched hand as she remained in the drug-induced rest, watching every twitch of her eyelids. She was dreaming. She hadn't dreamed for the first three days he'd been keeping watch. This was a development, a sign of life. He muttered thanks to any being that could hear him that she seemed to be improving. And then he found himself wondering what she was dreaming.

He knew he shouldn't even think about it. He should ask her permission, each and every time. While this body wasn't particularly psychic, as some of his previous ones had been, he could still miss the brush of minds. It was a reassurance so basic to Time Lords that it was likened unto a child hearing a mother's heartbeat. And he needed reassurance now. He felt his hands shaking in hers sometimes during the night, when he was fighting off his own nightmares as well as hers. And she had so-easily received the calming sensations he sent her when he first brought her back, as though she were desperate for the same contact. And the dreams and nightmares they'd shared so many times in the past few years were something. Almost like she was giving him permission to be in her mind because she was so clearly in his.

And so he brushed her hair out of her face, away from the burn that was healing so slowly he wasn't sure if the nanogenes had it in them to make her recover fully. They seemed broken, to be focusing on her extremities first, but there were still slow and steady progress. He caressed her new skin on her forehead. "Keep fighting, Miranda. Don't you leave me just yet. Too much to show you. Too much to tell you."

_Then tell me._

He blinked. He'd heard her, clear as day, but her lips hadn't moved. It was as much invitation as he needed, and now it was a mystery to solve.

He laid his hand on her forehead and felt the rush of information, emotion, and raw sensation that accompanied entering the mind of another living being. And hers, still stretched and raw after her encounter with the heart of the other TARDIS, was unlike any he'd been in contact with before. There were still golden strands giving last, dying breaths into the space of her mind, and he took a moment to be awed by it.

Her presence was evident everywhere around him, as though she wanted to remind him that this was her mind, her territory, and he was but a guest in it, Time Lord or no. It was an unusual feeling for him, to be in a place so perfectly assimilated into someone else. In his TARDIS, he was lord and master, and when he stepped out of it, he still understood more than most people. But here, it was utterly foreign, despite Miranda's familiarity. Even as he thought that, he felt the brush of her presence against his.

"Doctor." Her voice came to the foreground of the rush of information. No doors were closed in her mind, and everything was flowing past the both of them. He focused on the voice, and an image of her appeared in his mind's eye. But she was beautiful. Not that he didn't always think she was beautiful, and always had, but here, in her own projection of herself, flowing with the power of the Time Vortex, she was a goddess. He had never believed in such things before, but now he had the impulse to fall down and worship.

She must have sensed it, because she changed in front of him, into the girl he had met at her home in the middle of nowhere, plain and perfect in jeans and a t-shirt, radiating none of the glory from a moment before, though he could still see it in her eyes, gold and fire and a depth he hadn't anticipated. He wondered how much the invasion of her mind had changed her.

"Less than you think." Her tone was teasing and gentle. Tired, too. She was still outwardly asleep, but the rest she was getting had not yet fully recharged her mind. He would save his questions for later. "I promised I'd be with you when you needed me. I'm not getting out of that promise so easily." She laughed quietly, and they were suddenly on the plain of Gallifrey. It was a shallow version, but seen with awe and love, and the sight of it here, in her space, reminded him how much he cared about her.

She lay down on the soft red grass and held her hand out for him to join her. The warmth of the sun was strangely accurate - like the Serengeti, as he had once said. He shed his jacket, or rather, thought about shedding his jacket and it was so. He took her hand and sat down beside her, letting himself be pulled into a reclining position as she did the same. It was comfortable, with no threat of nightmare looming. It was peaceful, and with every passing moment, it felt more like the Gallifrey he knew. "That's alright? I don't mean to, I think I'm taking it from you. Your memories."

"You shouldn't be able to get in there." It wasn't an accusation, just a statement. He didn't know how much the exposure was affecting her psychic abilities, and he rather selfishly wanted to take it all in while he could.

"Not normally. But it's like a locked door - once you put the key to it, someone can go through from either side, right?" She leaned up on her elbow to look at him. "I invited you in, after all. Wanted to be hospitable." She stopped, and her eyes looked deep into him for a moment. "I missed seeing you. If that doesn't sound stupid."

"Doesn't sound stupid at all. If you're gonna make me admit it, I missed it too."

"What, seeing your face? Just need to put more mirrors up in the TARDIS." Her laughter was contagious, and he grinned up at her. He looked away from her for a moment, seeing the second sun rising over the mountains and turning everything golden. But still the gold was more vibrant than it should have been, almost living, and the Doctor was reminded that this was not a normal encounter on Gallifrey. There was still danger lurking here, and so much raw power.

"The TARDIS misses you, too." He added it to cover up his own moment of vulnerability, more than anything, but Miranda just laughed.

"She's been saying the same of you, I think. Did you really miss me Doctor? I've only been sitting right there, and you've hardly seen anything but my face for the past few days."

"She's been talking to you?"

"Kind of like we were first talking. No words, I just understand. It won't last long, and I'll forget all of it, I think. Once all these little golden strands untangle from my mind."

"You can see them?"

"I can see everything." Her eyes turned serious, and he knew that she meant the last word with deadly accuracy. "The beginning, the end, and all possible paths in between. It's... a bit much."

"Doesn't that kill you?"

She shrugged and rested her head on his chest. "Won't let it," she mumbled. "Promises to keep."

He held her against him, willing her to be as well on the outside as she seemingly was on the inside. He needed her back with him in a way that was almost childlike. "I have one for you, too, then. I can't promise to keep you safe, as you've demonstrated so clearly." He brushed his hands over her face, which on her physical body was still marred with slow-healing burns. "But I will never ever give up on you. I will always come back for you. Til I absolutely can't."

Her heart was in her throat. There was nothing to say, and words would cheapen that moment anyway. She wished she could be awake so that this moment would be real. Everything in her mind surged with emotion. Her mind felt warm, and bits of gold seemingly melted into her, loosening their grip on her mind without leaving her altogether. She cried, a single golden tear, and he brushed it away. "I'm coming back to you Doctor. And I expect you to show me all those things you promised."

"Every one." He understood that she couldn't sustain this long, this level of illusion for both of them, and he kissed her forehead gently. "I'll be there, waiting."

"Which is saying something, since waiting isn't exactly your strong suit."

"What? I'm good at waiting, me?"

"For things OUTSIDE the TARDIS," she teased. "You just jump ahead."

"Then I'd better learn to wait, don't you think? And this is a good enough reason." The plains and sun and mountains shimmered and faded into nothingness, and soon even Miranda's physical form was flickering. She wasn't used to this kind of psychic interaction. She was usually the passive viewer in someone else's memory, and now she was trying to generate a scene she was drawing from him. "Rest now."

"Mmk." Her body flickered and dimmed, like an old television set whose cathode tube was slowing shutting down. For a long moment, the Doctor let himself linger in her mind before returning back through the way he had come. Miranda was still asleep, but the burn marks on her face and arms were less noticeable. He straightened, re-calibrating to the real world. He had been in her mind for less than an hour, but it was more restful than all the fitful naps he'd taken. He'd wait for her to wake up. And then he was taking her somewhere amazing.


	12. Chapter 12

She laughed with relief and glee as they re-entered the TARDIS, reaching up to brush off a few fallen ashes from the Doctor's short hair. "Oh my god, Doctor. Krakatoa. I mean. The whole thing just... wow. I didn't know that it was an alien ship."

"A nuclear alien ship," he corrected, smirking back at her as the TARDIS doors closed. They'd been as close as safety would allow - probably closer, if Miranda knew the Doctor. "Bigger than anything the human race develops until well into the 24th Century. Good thing, too, because they didn't build containment facilities for blasts that big til they got to Mars."

"Yeah? And when was that?"

"First colony is there by the end of the 22nd Century, but there wasn't a full-time base cooperating with the Martians until about 2386. And then they started work on the power plant. First interplanetary effort by planet Earth. Well done, you lot. Made lots of other species sit up and take notice that you weren't quite the stupid apes they'd noticed a couple centuries before. Twenty-first century was a big one for aliens on Earth, though most people tried not to notice."

"Like they don't notice the big blue police box parked in the middle of everything?"

"Precisely." He was slightly manic as he set the coordinates, the TARDIS spinning violently at takeoff. She clutched the back of his jacket, bracing her other arm on the railing. They were still spinning, and he slipped from her grasp as he moved around the console, trying to do the job of six Time Lords. She was going to be sick. Worse. She was going to black out. Something possessed her to make a leap for the console, to do something - anything - that would make them stop spinning. She touched a small glass ball, and her fingers moved just so on it. They slid upward, like the old golf arcade game, then sideways. It was exact, and she heard the hum of a lullaby in the back of her mind. The spinning stopped.

"What'd you do?"

She shrugged, her hand still resting lightly on the small glass piece, but even she was looking down at it, startled. It had been dumb luck, she knew, that out of all the instruments on the panel, she had stumbled into that one. But it was more her exact manipulation of the instrument that was shocking. Perhaps all the watching she'd done as the Doctor piloted them across time and space had paid off.

"I dunno," she finally responded. Her hand snapped back from the controls, hurrying across the grate. "You know, I think I'll make a cup of tea. You know, need something like that after watching Krakatoa. And hearing it! Don't think my ears will ever be the same. Loudest noise in recorded history, they say, right? And we just came from there." She made it out of the console room before she noted how high and tense her voice sounded even to her ears. Even when they were apparently trapped forever in the transformation labs on Hermethica, she hadn't been so nervous. But on Hermethica, the Doctor had been there to explain things to her, or at least to lend her some confidence. Now, the feeling of the melody in the back of her head left her feeling out of sorts.

The Doctor came in later, as she sipped her tea. He looked calm, but years of practice at reading him told her otherwise. He was curious, nearly burning up with the desire to know what was going on. She had to give him credit for his restraint. She gave him a thin smile and held her hand out to him. He took it and pulled her to her feet slowly. He was gentle with her now, a side even she didn't often get to see. Her Doctor, at least this incarnation of him, was a passionate man, full of life as he struggled against the entire world. His anger was passionate, his sense of adventure was unparalleled, and even his loving was intense.

So it was this gentleness that broke her. She felt the tear rolling down her cheek before she knew she was crying. She felt stupid; she didn't even know why she was crying. She had escaped death for the millionth time since meeting the Doctor, and conveniently bumped the TARDIS back on course.

But it wasn't really a convenient accident. She'd heard it in her head. Heard him in her head, the practiced movements of his hands translating imperfectly into her desperation to stop the ship spinning out of control. It had been months now since this started - months since her hands and face and mind had been scarred by the destruction of the only working TARDIS she'd ever seen aside from their own. And now she was beginning to understand, and it scared her.

"You can still feel it, can't you? That space in your mind where the vortex ripped through." He ran his fingers through her hair as he let her cry against his jumper. "It'll pass. Humans aren't meant for that - no one is, not even me. But you're holding up. You're a tough one. You've been absolutely fantastic about all of it. Don't let it get to you now. I'm here, too, if you need me."

She took a gasping chuckle. "Oh you stupid, brilliant man. You are always so close to getting it, and then you just miss." She chuckled again self-consciously, wiping the tears off her cheeks and his lapel. "I always need you. I'm just... not used to needing."

"I know the feeling." He suddenly grinned, that manic expression that spread from ear to ear and fit him so perfectly. "Tell you what. I've got two things to show you. One inside and one outside. Which first?"

"Inside?"

"Inside the TARDIS. A place you've not been before."

"There are still places I haven't been?" She followed him as he led her by the hand out of the kitchen.

"Oh, Miranda, there are still loads of places you haven't been. But we'll get to that later. First things first."

"What is it?"

"A planet. One I haven't taken you to yet. Quiet, calm, boring. But an excellent place for a nice quiet sort of adventure."

"Almost sounds domestic," she teased.

"Don't you start with me," he warned playfully, moving to stand behind her next to the console. "But since you seem to have a knack for flying the TARDIS, and I'm all but certain she likes you, let's give it a go, shall we?" He felt her tense, and rubbed his calloused thumbs over her shoulders soothingly. "I'll stay right here, you know. Not going anywhere. Well, except wherever you steer the TARDIS too. But I'll put in the coordinates first." He reached up over her, and his sure hands typed on the keyboard that contained letters she didn't quite understand. "There you go. Now ease the wibbly lever back, that's the one. Ok, now wait for it..." his hands moved up to her biceps, then her shoulders, and she found herself mildly distracted. Now was not the time for that, and she found herself instead searching for what she was supposed to be doing. She found it in the lingering touch of the Doctor's mind on hers, along with that persistent song in the back of her head. Her hands moved over the instruments she could reach as the Doctor whispered directions in her ear, then stepped away from her to finish a few minor tweaks. "There you are. Might even be a proper pilot someday, as long as you've got me handy to help out."

"Where'd we come to?"

"The planet's called Woman Wept. Completely frozen in time. Some say it's because of the Time War. Others say it's because of a cataclysm involving a former double sun. Either way... it's all frozen, but not cold. The waves, the beaches... completely still and solid. There's only one continent on the whole thing, looks like a crying woman from above. But like I promised, quiet, but still plenty of space for an adventure." He gestured toward the door.

She took a step toward it, but instead threw herself back at the Doctor, kissing him for all she was worth. He was startled at first, but pulled her into him, growling low when she pulled away after a few too-short moments. "You're absolutely brilliant, you know that?" She was beaming now, a complete change from just before. "Absolutely brilliant. Anywhere you want to go after this."

"Well, we could see the stone festival of Hoshyl..." His voice was still low, his hands on her lower back playing with the hem of her shirt.

"Done." She grinned. "After we do some exploring here." She broke away from him and dashed toward the door, flinging it open and barely taking the time to ensure they weren't parked on the edge of cliff before running out. They were instead parked on the top of a large, cresting wave, permanently held there by whatever had caused this planet to stop cold. "Oh, my..." She reached her hand back for the Doctor's, twining her fingers in his own as she leaned back into him, surveying the frozen seascape from where they were.

She let him start to pull her back into him again before she started out of the TARDIS at a full run, knocking him off balance slightly as she stepped away, sticking her tongue out at him as she ran. "Slow poke!" She was enjoying running. It had only been a few days since her muscles and skin had knit themselves properly together, and she felt faster, stronger, and better able to keep up with the Doctor than ever before. She wanted to test that - to push herself. Her mind was still stretched thin in some places, but she was getting back to normal. Or maybe she was growing into it.

She knew he wasn't slow, though, knew he was faster than her, and she sat down fast and slid down the frozen wave into the trough. There was not much soft about this planet, and she put her feet down hard to slow herself before the bottom, then looked back up to the top of the hill. Strangely, the Doctor was standing there, considering her. "You coming?"

He didn't answer, but walked away. She shrugged, having apparently mistaken their game, but continued along the bottom of the wave, looking through the deep emeralds and impossible blues of the frozen waters.

She shrieked when she felt hands on her waist, his hands catching her defensive strike easily, and kissing her again. She laughed. "You scared the hell out of me! How'd you get down here?"

He nodded behind him absently, where the TARDIS was now situated. "Turned off the parking break. Silent as can be now."

"Well that's a trick! We should do that more often."

"I can think of a few things we should do more often."

"Explore amazing planets of frozen seas?" She ran her hand down his chest, then turned to walk away from him again. He held her hand against him.

"Explore, yes." He whispered against her hair. "You were in my mind again, when we were flying, weren't you? I was trying to show you things, and you could see into me, and that makes me want things. Makes me distracted." He kissed her fingertip, and she bit her lip. Was it this much an aphrodisiac for the Doctor to see into her head? Although after years together, it shouldn't surprise her what got him into this mood. It shouldn't, but it did.

"Let me see what you promised outside the TARDIS. Then you can show me the inside."

"'S bigger on the inside," he whispered seductively.

She laughed. "Oh, really? You're using that on me? Works on all the girls."

He paused, smiling at her happiness, the considered. "Actually, yeah, usually does."

She punched him lightly. "Oi! Watch it or I'll start talking about all the other boys I've been with."

"That'd be a short conversation, you're such a young thing."

"You are just on a roll today. From hero to zero in no time flat."

"Zero?" He tried to catch her hand in his, but she dodged just out of the way. "Come on, Miranda..."

"For the record, I may be a young thing, but I wasn't a prude."

"No, but you didn't have much time, relatively speaking..."

"What, and you make a stop at a brothel on every planet you visit?" She was teasing, but her expression changed when his turned smug. "Oh god."

"Don't have to, if you know what I mean."

"Mhm. Mr. Seduction, you are."

"I believe it was you who called me Casanova."

"It's a turn of phrase!"

"Casanova didn't think so. He was quite proud of himself. Til I showed him up of course."

"Of COURSE you've met Casanova. And of course you were better than him, all superior Time Lord physiology and double hearts and respiratory bypass systems."

"What? It's a definite advantage, among other things." She eyed him skeptically. "Oh come on, it's not like you haven't benefited from all of it."

"Benefited? Sure. Whatever. Best I've ever had. Don't expect you to say the same." She huffed, trying to gather herself. She was precariously close to crying, and that was not at all how this was supposed to go.

"Well, like I said, the odds aren't exactly in your favor."

She cracked open, and the tears burst through with a raucous guffaw. "No, they're not." Images flashed through her head of a blonde girl with eyes full of adoration, a woman with a knowing smile and curly hair, and strangely, Queen Elizabeth. She filed those away. Those were not from his mind, those images full of gold flecks. She was seeing things she shouldn't again. She tried not to let him see that anything was scaring her. She let out a long sigh instead, shaking her head sadly at the Doctor. She backed away a few feet while he processed what was happening, then felt a surge of energy in her body as she took off running. She was in trainers, a t-shirt, and light jeans, and easily pulled away from the Doctor in his heavy boots and leather jacket. She'd never done that before. It was exhilarating. It was vindicating.

She ran and ran and ran, following the curves of the waves, little eddies in the water that made paths between them, small hills of water, until she was well and truly lost. She didn't even know where she'd come from. When she stumbled upon the shore, she stopped. She sat on the sand, but it didn't shift with her weight. She was crying, her tears and her breath were the only things moving. It was strange, to be alone on a silent planet. She hadn't been alone in a long time. She was always on some new planet, or with the Doctor, or even the TARDIS. She had come to count the TARDIS' presence as not being alone, since it was obviously more than a machine. It even sang to her, after all.

She began to hum that song without realizing, the haunting one she heard in her mind now and again. The one she'd heard the first day, and the day of the explosion, and today when she learned to fly. Only now it echoed longer. She took deep breaths, bringing herself under control. She felt warm, uncomfortably so, and her head hurt. It wasn't a surprise - the Doctor had said there might be some aftereffects of her exposure to the Time Vortex. She was only human after all.

Only human. How many times would she be reminded of that? That she wasn't a Time Lord, or the Face of Boe, or a sky fish, or a TARDIS. She was a regular old human, not even from this dimension. Nothing. And she was getting old. She didn't count birthdays, because she was never sure of the date, but she would be decently into her forties. She didn't look it - she didn't look much older than the day she stepped aboard the TARDIS, which was all well and good, since the Doctor didn't like to see change inside his TARDIS unless he was the cause of it.

She laughed bitterly at the thought that if she were still on Earth, still among normal human beings, she would be a miracle girl, still looking 27 years old after her 42nd birthday. Because it had been that long. She had been with the Doctor for longer than her marriage had lasted back home. Although that wasn't really a surprise, since it had lasted only a few years. Her ex-husband had told her she was frumpy and boring when he'd broken it off, and the he was looking for excitement she just couldn't give. His beautiful free-spirited girlfriend he'd robbed from the cradle could. Another round of laughter cut through her. Ah well, she wasn't boring. She'd worked for the Department of Justice in the field for a few years before her father died, before she'd retreated away from the rest of the world, and before the TARDIS materialized on her doorstep. Now, she'd been part of saving more worlds than she could keep track of, seen more events than she had cared to, and met more people than she could have possibly done any other way. She lived in a ship that traveled through time and space. Hardly boring.

But still she felt it. She felt that nagging voice in the back of her mind that it wasn't enough. Maybe now she would be far from boring at home, but this was the Doctor she was talking about, the last of the Time Lords, the savior and destroyer of worlds, the man who had shown up Casanova and Einstein and Neil Armstrong. He was so far from boring. Boring's opposite. Wherever he went, boredom couldn't even exist. It felt like that. Except for her.

She was the domestic, boring part of his life. That was obvious. And he often said he hated domestic, so she kept up the running and the adventures and the exploring. And they thrilled her. But she was getting old. Her human self wanted to settle down. Wanted all the domestic things she couldn't have with the Doctor. And the Doctor was reminiscing about all the things he used to be able to have before her. And she felt his desire to have those things again.

Nothing around her moved. Not sand, not wind, not water, not even time. She didn't know how long she sat there, alone, turning things over in her head. She could have sat there for a thousand years and not known it. But she felt the tugging on her mind, the gentle brush of a concerned, and angry, friend. The TARDIS had found her, and it was warning her to play nice with her thief, sister or no. Miranda grunted to herself and stood up, moving to brush the sand from her pants only to realize there was none. She felt coldness around her in this time locked place, and as she stood a bolt of pain split through her. bright and hot and golden in her mind's eye. She snapped her eyes shut and clutched at her head, trying to stop it from rocking through her quite so violently.

She heard the TARDIS' materialization alarm - it's parking brake, or so the Doctor had said - and knew the Doctor would arrive soon. So she stood and waited.

"Miranda! I've been looking for you. TARDIS couldn't pick you up on the first scan. Because of the way time seems to move here, it was like the whole planet was vibrating as soon as we arrived. I had to recalibrate the scanners. But you've moved miles! You're practically a marathon runner now."

She looked down at her legs, but didn't turn back to him. She was breathing in timelessness, willing it to become part of her. It was cold and calm and filled her head with something other than searing pain and her own thoughts. "Told you that your next one should be, didn't I? Nanogenes apparently grant wishes." She smiled weakly as the pain started to dissipate into her arms and fingers and legs and toes.

He stood awkwardly behind her, arms crossed and a frown on his face. "You alright?"

"Will be." She took a long, deep breath and tried to settle herself back into place before turning around. She turned around and walked back to the TARDIS, leaning on the doorframe and looking back at him. "Come on then."

He should have apologized, and so should she, but they were past that for now. Something else was nagging at her, and he could see it. He tucked his arm loosely around her waist and walked inside with her, laying a kiss on her temple.

She sighed and turned into him, meeting his lips with hers. It wasn't perfect, and maybe it wouldn't last, but it was hers. And she was going to steal some time for herself.


	13. Chapter 13

"And all they found was the footprints leading away from the collapsed rail bridge - a single set of footprints that started out as human...and ended up as those of a gigantic hound." They were both quiet for a moment, the firelight casting odd shadows across Miranda's face as she looked darkly at the Doctor, waiting for his reaction to her tale of terror.

"Not bad," he finally chimed, apparently not at all terrified. "But half of the effect of those tales is in the atmosphere. Hard to believe a tale of shape-shifting horror in the deep woods when you're an alien sitting on a TARDIS in deep space."

She huffed. They'd been at this for a while - a few months at least; she'd wrack her brain for a good ghost story from her childhood to try to get a rise out of him, and he would laugh her off, then counter with a story of his own. His were always worse, and she often had to make sure he didn't leave her sight until she'd fallen asleep, or, for the more terrifying ones, she'd demanded they go to bright, fun locations. More often than not, that meant they saved the day for the inhabitants of said bright, fun location, but it was still better than being in the dark.

When he'd told her about the Vashta Nerada, they'd gone to a planet with seven suns, that was balanced in the gravity of all of them, and so there was no night. Ever. She'd seen their work in her nightmares on the TARDIS, and just couldn't shake it.

"So how are you going to one up me this time? A little atmosphere?" She was teasing, but his eye caught the adventurous glint she was used to.

"Atmosphere's what you want? I'll give you atmosphere." He popped up from the rug where they were sitting in front of the fireplace and dashed out to the console room.

Miranda chuckled quietly, pushing herself up off the ground slowly to follow him. She usually waited until he was gone to get up from the floor, or let him gallantly help her. It had been a long time since she first set foot on the TARDIS, and though the nanogenes still mended her skin quickly enough, they were weaker and older now, just like her. She glimpsed her reflection in a piece of glass, and paused to look at the transparent image. There were no wrinkles, and perhaps she looked on the outside like the 29-year-old she had been when she first joined the Doctor, but she ached as she hadn't before. She was still human, and he was still a Time Lord, and no matter how many times he promised her forever, and she promised him the end of time, they both knew it was a lie.

She sighed, biting the inside of her lip to force away tears. That, after all, was her deepest fear. That after years of life with him, she'd have to go away. That despite the fact that his face had started out so much older than hers, she would eventually bypass him, and die. Even if the nanogenes made her an ageless Snow White, she would still have to bite the poisoned apple of human mortality. There was no horror story that matched the terror of such fairy tales for her.

The Doctor was busy at work in the console room - flying between levers and pullies and buttons, the familiar sound of the TARDIS humming through her mind and buzzing through the air. She'd had a moment ageswhere the TARDIS seemed to show her how to fly, and the Doctor had filled in the gaps in her memory. The strange hum in the back of her mind was more discernible that day, and it seemed to tell her what to do - and then she had done it. It was easy, almost predictable, and she now sometimes teased the Doctor that she was a far better driver. She flicked a few switches to transfer power to the stabilizers - the Doctor often conveniently forgot this step - and settled herself against the railing to watch him work. "Where are we going?"

"Oh, I was thinking the Black Ages of Arboranthum. It's a tree home world, one of three. This one's good for hardy trees that like cold. Huge trees, too, near the equator. Like walking, talking redwoods."

"So like ents."

"Ents?"

"Lord of the Rings. Come on, you've read Lord of the Rings, right?" He shook his head, not quite making eye contact with her. He was usually far more cultured than her on every planet and time they went to. Only a few times had she shown him up - once in Victorian Scotland they'd run into Mrs. Margaret Oliphant, whom Miranda had engaged in a long discussion about her novellas while the Doctor waited rather impatiently. He'd later complained that had there only been a copy of the story in question handy, he could have read it within a few moments. She'd teased him for being a poor sport before making it up to him. He hadn't complained then.

"Erm, I mostly missed the Tolkien rage, I suppose." He looked chagrined, and she chuckled and ran her fingers through his short hair.

"No worries. You can read it next time I nap. It'll be something to occupy your time instead of tinkering with the nanogenes. Seems to upset the TARDIS."

"She's not upset!"

The console made a short whirring noise that very definitely sounded miffed. Miranda's lips turned upward in a smirk. "You were saying?"

"Just trying to see what makes 'em tick. I'll make it up to her."

"Right." Miranda pressed her hand to her lips and then against the metal of the console. "So are we there yet?"

"You that anxious to be terrified witless by the shadow forests?"

"I'm ready to go exploring, if that's what you mean."

He walked out of the TARDIS ahead of her, his arm lagging behind him so that she could take his hand. They were in the middle of a deep forest. The trees were well spaced, as though arranged in rows, and stood hundreds of feet high. The TARDIS was tiny by comparison, making her even tinier. It felt like they were scowling down at her, and she was glad for the Doctor's hand. "This enough atmosphere for you?"

"It's a start." She straightened up and mustered her confidence. "So you going to tell me the tale as we walk? Or do you have a particular destination in mind?"

"No place in particular. Just setting the mood." He twined his fingers with hers and grinned.

"You know, when you say that, I feel like you're a teenage boy who takes his date to the slasher flick so she'll let him put his arm around her."

"They do that?"

"It's a bit of a cliché, yes."

"Smart boys then." He grinned at her again, and it was contagious, even in the heavy dark of Arboranthum. She smiled back at him, and for a moment she saw his whole history in his gaze - other pairs of eyes smiling back at her. She forgot sometimes that her Doctor was not the only version of himself. He'd been old. He'd been a father – a grandfather. He'd saved worlds and destroyed them. He'd been debonair and goofy and deadly and gentle and diabolical. He was the whole universe wrapped up in one man, she thought. She leaned over and kissed his cheek. "What was that for?"

"Dunno. Just wanted to." She shrugged and kept pace with him. She closed her eyes for a brief moment when he kissed the top of her head. It was an oddly sweet moment for him. She had gotten used to the manic bounces between raging intensity and quick humor, between letting the universe pass around him and being the center of it. Gentleness was not her Doctor's strong suit. She loved him, but treasured these moments, a small part of her knowing that they were glimpses of a past and a future she would not be allowed to see.

They walked in the growing darkness, and she imagined that even the tops of the trees were cloaked in blackness now. The chill in the air began to creep down her spine and she shivered. "There we are. Now I can start telling you tales of terror. A mite more believable here, wouldn't you say?"

"We'll see. I'm still pretty proud of my old lumber mill horror story."

"You would be. So imagine that you're in a place a lot like this – ancient, dark, full of beings you don't even know are sentient, perhaps. Rumors are that the rocks can talk between themselves, and every groan of the wind through a crack has you checking your back. You've crash landed your ship after a sunstorm, and you're the only surviving crew member…"

As it turned out, the Doctor was right. Atmosphere made all the difference. That tale, not actually so dreadful on it's own, was made downright terrifying by the swaying of branches and the scuttling of things in the underbrush. She wanted simultaneously to punch him and cling to him. "We are lighting a giant raging fire in the fireplace when we get back to the TARDIS. How far out are we?" She looked around for the familiar blue shape, but couldn't see it.

"About a ten minute's walk. You want to head back? If I'm not wrong, the old Arboranthine temple isn't far ahead. Grand architecture carved purely out of stone."

"Wood would be a disturbing choice, huh?"

"Precisely! So you want to go then? Fantastic!" He clutched her hand tighter and set off. "Now, you see, the trees weren't always sentient. They're DNA got mixed up with some human stuff, as well as some other sentient plant matter, and then evolution happened and well, the Arboranthines were the first to develop. The most tree-like, as you're used to them on earth. Sentient, but slow-thinking. Still, when they live hundreds of years, you can afford to think slow."

"So slow thinking's a common problem for beings that are hundreds of years old?" She stuck her tongue out at him as he frowned at her.

"Here we are!" He gestured toward the monument - hundreds of feet high, like a great Tower of Babel that reached impossibly into the sky.

"Almost as tall as the Star-Touching Temple on Barcelona."

She frowned. "That was not such a great day."

"Nonsense. It was the day I knew I was gonna keep you around."

She looked at him skeptically, the creaking noises of the forest making her take a step closer as they walked toward the structure. "Really? Seemed more like the day I got drunk on a foreign chemical, played with guns, and blew up a factory. Not a high moment in my career."

"Can't always be perfect."

"Unless you're the Doctor," she teased.

He stopped, putting his hands on her shoulders gravely as he faced her. "Especially when you're the Doctor." His eyes widened suddenly, and she barely had time to register the look of fear on his face before he threw her sideways. She hit the ground hard and felt her arm crumple underneath her as she failed to break her fall. The creaking sound of the forest was amplified, roaring around her now as she tried to come to grips with what she was seeing. The trees were moving, trembling like children before a powerful and frightening monster.

And it was truly tree that was moving was massive - she and the Doctor had been to entire worlds that were smaller than this beast. It moved gracefully, a feat for something of its size. It was wondrous, but she couldn't waste much time examining it. "Doctor!" She cried out for him, his form lost to her from where she lay in the underbrush. "Doctor where are you?" She held out her hand blindly as she struggled to her feet, hoping for the familiar feeling of his fingers twining with hers with the unspoken command to run. Her eyes desperately scanned her surroundings for the familiar black jacket. She didn't see it.

The earth thundered as the giant tree stepped forward, and Miranda was thrown to the ground again, her head full of thunder and new parts of her body ringing shrilly with pain. "Doctor! Please!"

The whole world seemed to be waiting to be crushed under the monstrous movement of the tree. Her mind raced - then it began to hum. The thundering was still there, echoing through her mind, but the expanse she hadn't felt in years was there now, forced out in a violent ballooning of sensation. She didn't only feel her surroundings - she felt everything. The lullaby soared through the cathedral-like space of her brain, and she thought of the Doctor. Images that were not hers accompanied her thoughts: her walking with the Doctor, the Doctor shoving her away, his own body flying the other direction with the shudder of the earth. His head connecting too-solidly with the ground - the rock beneath the thin layer of moss. He didn't stand again. He was still lying there now. Now, as the tree moved in terrible circles, confused and tormented just as they were. The Doctor was still alive, but...

She felt the pain sear through her. Not her pain, but she screamed anyway. High and loud and long, the scream ripped out of her and for a brief moment, the tree stopped. The pain in her mind was not hers, but she felt it. She realized that the tree could feel it too, and had stopped, checking itself for damage. She tried to push the pain away, and the tree moved. The Doctor was beaten, the weight of a few branches having snapped his legs. She felt that. She screamed again, amplifying his pain in her head. If she stopped, if she lessened his pain, the tree would move again, and they would both die. She heard the Doctor's own pitiful moans and wished she could stop. She had to get him out of there, but his weight was dead - mostly unconscious, and with his legs out of commission - and her wrist was surely sprained or broken.

She clenched her teeth. There was nothing for it; it had to be done. She slipped her body next to his, holding her arm awkwardly as she tried to both use it and protect it. Finally, she got the bulk of him on her shoulders. Muttering a quiet apology for how badly this would probably hurt, she pulled him with her, dragging his body more than she would like, knowing that each jolt of his legs against the ground was excruciating. She could feel that - his pain passed through the air to her mind, newly raw with the burst of telepathy from both of them. She heard the tree start to move and feared the worse, hunkering them down by a large rock she could only hope would break the tree's step. The sound of a crash further away alerted her to the fact that it was leaving, that they weren't going to be crushed to death. She took a deep breath.

The Doctor was out cold, the pain having just been too much for him. She kissed his forehead, then looked around for something to brace her wrist with, finally settling on a piece of a branch that seemed rather sturdy. She wrapped it with a piece of her shirt, then sat down next to the Doctor to see how badly off he was. She looked at his jeans lightly touching them, and recoiling when she felt the brokenness beneath them. She kissed his forehead again, steeling herself against the pain that was surely to follow. She hoisted him up again, this time bearing his weight on her arm.

She began to hum the melody to the lullaby, focusing on that, letting the pain pass through her. She moved with the melody, and soon words formed on her lips. Quiet words that didn't even make sense, but they distracted her from the pain, and walking was easier. The sounds seemed to vibrate through her, moving the song from her mind through her entire being. Ten minutes, the Doctor had said. A ten minute walk at normal speed. It seemed like hours before she saw the TARDIS' welcome blue exterior.

When she finally collapsed after depositing the Doctor on the bed in the medical bay, she gave herself a moment to breathe before speaking softly to the TARDIS, whose worried hum was hard to ignore. "Emergency protocol 17. Earth's moon. Please." She was gasping for breath between each statement, and she heard the engines whir to life before she had even finished. She took a minute to patch herself up first before turning to the Doctor. To her surprise, the ambient nanogenes seemed to spring to life. She pulled off the makeshift splint and blessed the little machines as she gently flexed her fingers.

She turned to the Doctor, using a pair of scissors to cut away his bloody jeans. He'd be upset about that, but they could argue about his damaged clothes later. She wrinkled her nose. The sight wasn't pretty. The weight falling on his legs had been significant, and the damage was visible. As she exposed the wounds, though, a faint golden glow seemed to dance around them - nanogenes.

She nearly cried with joy when she realized what was happening. His tinkering, his boundless curiosity about what makes things tick, was paying off. The gold swirled around his legs, and she stood by, watching to make sure all was going well. She managed to remove his jacket and jumper, along with the ruined jeans, hanging up the first two and tossing the latter in the bin. Keeping an eye on the golden glow - she could see his bone mending - she wet a cloth to put on his brow. The pain had taken its toll, and a sheen of sweat covered him.

Then there was only waiting. She rested her head next to his, feeling her adrenaline trail off into exhaustion. She blinked for a long moment, and when next she opened her eyes, the work on the Doctor's legs was nearly complete. She smiled sleepily, pressing a kiss to his forehead before dozing back off.

She dreamt of infinity. She'd never seen so much all at once, even in the heart of the TARDIS. Unbounded in time or place or perspective, she saw everything. Her mind was filled with it. And once again she found him as a lifeline. She traced the shape of his timeline, fissured and fractured as it was, and it felt familiar. It felt like home.

While they slept, the miraculous little robots were doing their job. Every bone mended, every bruise healed, every scar smoothed over. Due to the Doctor's dabbling, they had been familiarized with all that superior Time Lord physiology, and didn't seem the worse for having to conquer the triple helix structure. They crept up the Doctor's unconscious form, mending it as they went, sorting out the parts of him that travel through the vortex was damaging.

They reached his head, leaving off their work on him, but being the intuitive creatures that they were, they recognized another being touching him, something that they vaguely recognized in their programming. Gold specks danced around her face as she dreamt of eternity, trying to confirm what they knew of this species. Human traces... time lord traces... Brilliant though they were, they couldn't quite confirm.

Then they encountered her mind. From the processes occurring, the little machines could only match them with the genetic information present in their upgraded coding - Time Lord. The information spread quickly through the entire microscopic fleet - Time Lord, Time Lord, Time Lord... Each strand of DNA was wrong. Each helix needed another addition. The nanogenes had their work cut out for them.

And the Doctor and Miranda slept on.


	14. Chapter 14

She woke up out of a nightmare of golden clouds with a start. Something was different. Something had changed while she slept. Her thoughts moved quickly as she took in her surroundings. Something was still changing. She closed her eyes to take a mental inventory and a deep breath. All of that happened in less than a moment. She was thinking faster. And she remembered the cathedral expanse of her mind during the attack the night before.

The Doctor's arm tightened around her. He'd taken off her dirty clothes while she slept, and was now looking down at her with worried affection. She offered him a small smile as reassurance, then looked down at her wrist, testing it gingerly. Since it seemed to be working, she traced her fingers down his arm, feeling for the scrapes and cuts that had been there the night before. When she didn't find them, she grinned. "Well that was a close call, huh?"

"Closer than I'd like." His expression changed, like a shadow passing over the sun. She knew what he was thinking.

"How many times do I have to tell you - I chose this. I chose you. Life with you. And all the crazy beautiful risks that entails." She kissed him soundly for emphasis. "Understand?"

"Understood." His voice still held that brooding darkness, and she didn't believe him.

"Well, since we're all squared away, I'm going to make breakfast. Omelets? Omelets sound good." She slipped out of bed and pulled one of his loose shirts over her, tying her hair back as she left her bedroom.

The rest of the TARDIS was often the paragon of automation - having a mostly-sentient ship did that for you - but Miranda had guarded a little corner of the kitchen. It reminded her of home, she said. Sometimes she needed that, and the Doctor could always tell when she was homesick by the dozens of cookies, cakes, pies, and pastries that floated out of that corner. Stress baking, she called it. He didn't argue. She made an excellent banana cream pie.

She had already cracked the eggs when he walked in, and the smell of banana bread was already coming out of the oven. He'd taken his time, lingered in her bed for awhile, then stopped to get dressed and check a few things in the med bay. He had a lot of questions about what had happened the night before, and would wait until the next time Miranda slept to search through the TARDIS' surveillance records. He hadn't expected the modified nanogenes to be put to the test so quickly. He felt fine, of course, but what about Miranda?

"Slow poke," she teased, dancing around the kitchen to grab plates and cutlery to set the table. "But right on time I suppose. Breakfast is ready." She pulled out a still-steaming loaf of banana bread, and the Doctor took a deep breath.

"Now that's a reason to wake up in the morning."

"Figured you'd like it. And after yesterday..." she frowned for a moment, then continued, "I figured you could use a treat."

He sat down at his usual seat - though he never would have thought he'd have a usual seat - and dug into the omelet. Well, more of a scramble, since omelets had never been Miranda's strong suit. It was alright, nothing to write home about, really. But he groaned softly when he bit into the banana bread with just a hint of melting butter. "I'm undone."

"You say that every time. I think it's only because you got used to food from that awful machine."

"It wasn't awful! It made a great liver and onions."

"That looked like Mars Bars."

"That technology wasn't Martian. Time Lord all the way."

"You know, humans consider gastronomy to be an art linked with civilization. Time Lords seemed to have missed that part of development." She smirked and popped a bite-size piece of banana bread into her mouth.

"Full-on kitchen isn't very practical on a ship."

"Helps keep you sane, though, to have a nice home-cooked meal once in awhile."

"It's a time ship. Could have a nice meal whenever I have the craving."

The echo of his unfinished statement rang in her mind. _No place to go that felt like home. It's always been the TARDIS, and it's always been me._ She stood up and kissed his temple, cutting him another slice of bread before beginning the do the dishes.

"So, what exactly happened yesterday?"

"How much do you remember?" She glanced out the holographic window at the moon, where they were quietly circling again. She liked this view.

"I remember being on Arboranthum, seeing the temple, then the ground moving. Not much after that. Was hoping you could piece it together."

"Well, you shoved me aside when the tree moved, that's when you blacked out, I think." She didn't want to go over this. Didn't want to explain her fear for him when she couldn't see him. The thought that she wouldn't be able to protect him. Her own pain, and his amplified in her mind. She mostly didn't want to tell him about the recurrence of whatever had happened to her mind. Fear had stimulated it, probably, and she had been more than any human could biologically be. She was the vortex, it had seemed to her. She felt suddenly tired and turned to lean back against the edge of the counter.

"That's when I dragged you back here. The TARDIS and your nanogene experiments took it from there." She turned to start doing dishes. Running warm water over her hands, she willed her fear to go away. He would notice soon if she didn't. He always did.

"And how are you feeling?" He had stood and was looking at her with concern. He knew she wasn't telling him everything.

"Fine. Better than fine, actually. Hurt my wrist during the mess yesterday, and it seems to be right as rain today." She turned it, displaying how much better it clearly was. "See?"

He caught her hand and kissed her knuckles. "Good. My tinkering turned out to be useful after all."

"Usually does." She smiled at him, then flinched away with a sharp hiss. She put her hand to her temple.

"What is it? What's wrong?" Any of a million things he could conceive of. She was a human, and had been in the Time Vortex for a long time with him, long enough to seriously damage her DNA. He'd hoped the still-remaining nanogenes would help with those repairs, and so far it had been doing alright. Miranda didn't know he saw her moments of aches and pains, and it kept her pride up to think she kept it from him. But he knew, and he had been working on patching the human nanogenes. A fool's errand, but when it came to Miranda Larsen, the Doctor knew he was the fool.

"Just my head. Sudden headache. I'll be fine." Her teeth were gritted.

"Back to bed with you. I'll make you a nice cup of tea. You can sleep it off." He was lying. So was she. It wasn't just a headache - it felt like every cell in her head was splitting open and rearranging itself. She didn't know how she managed to walk back to the bedroom, but collapsing onto her bed was so welcome. She vaguely felt the Doctor's cool hand on her forehead, on her temple, and then there was... something. A war between the calm he was trying to send to her and the infinite chaos in her mind broke out, and she groaned again, rolling away from him. She was dying, she was sure.

The Doctor practically flew to the medical bay for equipment to scan her. Something was very wrong. As though the nanogenes were doing too much work. His face greyed as he read the scan. All her major organs were human, and in perfect repair. But her mind...

Her mind carried all the expanse of a Time Lord.


	15. Chapter 15

It had been weeks since her first headache when the Doctor suggested a diversion on Kava, a carnival and market planet in the Jhitosk System. She'd jumped at the chance - she'd seen posters for the shows on several nearby planets during their visits, and even the Doctor had spoken of the one-of-a-kind items to be found amidst the tents and traders. His smile at her enthusiasm helped ease her frustration. She wanted to be better, if only to ease his worried frown and see that smile more often.

It had been a tense few weeks aboard the TARDIS. He'd taken to tinkering with the nanogenes for hours at a time without telling her why, and she had disappeared with headaches that she didn't want to bother him with. She'd tried to sleep them off at first, but after the first few days, she had abandoned that plan. She'd drunk more coffee than was healthy (the TARDIS had suddenly installed an ensuite bathroom for her), then tried some herbal medications. She had, out of some deep aversion and the Doctor's subtle steering, avoided aspirin.

The headaches came most nights, and they didn't stop when she managed to sleep. The pain ripped through her dreams, and she saw things. Even now, as she was straddling the line between sleep and wakefulness, she dreamt. The Time Vortex swirled in her mind. Half-asleep, the now-familiar hum grew louder in her ears, filling her mind with indecipherable noises and voices. She listened closer, forging meaning where she could. She knew his voice now, and though she tried to seize onto it, it flitted past her. She imagined she knew all his voices. She tried to focus on one, any one.

"Sing it again, father!" A small child's voice. Sleepy, but trying to pretend she wasn't.

"Last time, my dear, and then you have to sleep." His voice was loving, resigned, peaceful. She liked listening to his voice like that. She held onto that voice as he hummed the melody, the one that had seemed to follow her since she'd set foot on the TARDIS. It was haunting and minor, comforting only in the fact that she knew it, and knew his voice. She listened for a long while, the song repeating itself a few times. She was tempted to just let it lull her into a deep, oblivious sleep, just like the child.

The song continued, but it was no longer peaceful. It was hummed through gritted teeth, pain and rage and smoke and blood filling the air in this new dreamscape. Another voice she knew without having heard. Alone in a room she recognized as his workshop now, the song continued, and she understood that the child was gone. All the good things about that red world were gone. A modified De-Mat gun was on the workbench.

The pain echoed through her head again, and it almost seemed as if the Doctor noticed her cry of pain. She blinked, realizing that even his memory, this past self with the long flowing hair and jacket, was trying to take her pain. She pulled back, not wanting to hurt him anymore.

And then she heard it, just like she had the very first day. Only now she understood. "...All of time and space. How could she be so wrong? There are so many of them, in so many worlds and so many times, and they always think...She'll save every world we see and still think that she doesn't matter. That the universe will just go on ticking without her." There was a moment, a break. "I've done this to her, and she doesn't even know." She saw him now, clear as day, hunched over a cluster of wires under the console in the control room. His eyes were tired, and she reached a hand out to stroke his shoulder and comfort him. He leaned into it, though her hand wasn't really there.

"You heard that, didn't you? Your mind's wandering in ways you don't even know are possible. And it's my fault. You won't even remember this. But I'll find a way to fix it. A great fixer, me."

She couldn't find a voice to use, and instead ghosted a kiss upon his forehead. "And already so strong with this. Gallifrey would have loved you." His shoulders sagged again, and he tried to look into the spot where he thought she might be, if it were more than her mind's presence. "I do."

She lost him then, as a rush of information filled her mind. The Time Vortex, but more specifically the TARDIS. She'd felt a brush against her mind that felt like the word sister, but didn't understand much more. Timelines stretched out in front of her. Faces she suddenly knew names for, places she'd never yet seen that she momentarily called home, tools she couldn't invent that she suddenly had use for. Kava. Memory. Manipulator. Psychic Paper. Images and item names flashed across her mind like a shopping list. And then she knew - it was a shopping list.

Back in her bed, she blinked. She sat up slowly, her head, neck, and eyes still sore in the aftereffects of the headache. The dream had been so different from the destruction and fire of recent days. She gathered herself, trying not to let the words of her dream affect her as she got dressed. It was, after all, only a dream.

In the console room, the Doctor missed the touch of Miranda's mind already. It was both exhilarating and painful to have it happen. Exhilarating, because it had been so long since the mind of another Time Lord had touched his. Painful, because she was no Time Lord, and the nanogenes might yet kill her. He had to find the modifier kit on Kava. It was a hack, a non-standard upgrade, and there was only a chance it would work. But he couldn't let her carry on in such excruciating pain, though she pretended it was passing.

He scooted out from the console and sat in the captain's chair, tossing a ball in the air. If she didn't see him in the same place, she might disregard what she'd seen as a normal human dream. She might not realize what he'd said to her in his moment of weakness. He needed her not to remember.

When she finally appeared, her long dress, tied around her neck in a halter, stopped him cold, and the ball fell down on him, bopping him soundly in the nose. She giggled, though she tried to hide it behind her hand. He jumped up, tossing the ball aside, grinning from ear to ear. "Ready then?"

She slyly flipped a switch, sending him tumbling back into his chair as she calmly moved around the console, moving dials and pulling levers. "Kava, right? Year 28C10-203?"

He regained his balance, reaching under her arm to press a flashing button, taking the opportunity to breath her in when she was close. "Just where I was aiming."

She moved away from him. "And since I'm driving, we just might get there." She stuck her tongue out at him, then dodged around the console when he came at her with a shout of indignation. She tumbled to the ground when the TARDIS came to a stop, laughing hard as she stared up at the ceiling. It felt like old times. She reached blindly for his hand, letting his fingers intertwine with hers as he pulled her to her feet. She felt young and brash and adventurous. She felt like she could take on the universe with him.

She stopped at the door, turning to him. "Ready slowpoke?" He guided her by the waist as he pushed the door open. The markets of Kava stretched before her in every direction.


	16. Chapter 16

"Kava's the largest market planet in the Jhitosk System. Has been for ages and ages. The Jhitosk were known for their uncanny business skills before they transformation of their original homeworld into an intergalactic shopping mall, but once this planet started doing business, it never stopped growing. Beings from all over the galaxy come for hard-to-find treasures, fancies, tools, fashion, doodads and thingamajigs. Technical term." The Doctor's face faked seriousness as they walked down the main street of this district.

"And I take it, from the wares on display, that we're in the doodads and thingamajigs district?" She brushed a finger over a scarf that fleetingly displayed images of her home, that little house in the middle of nowhere, where the Doctor had first stumbled upon her.

"Close. Doodads is to the northeast and thingamajigs due north. We're in gadgetry."

"Sounds right up your alley." She thought about asking him for the scarf, or at least asking what sort of currency they use in this system, but knew he'd get there. And she just might pick it up when she came back through.

"It's nice enough. Good to pick up spare parts now and again."

"Can't the TARDIS make everything?"

"Sure, but where's your sense of adventure?" He squeezed her hand tightly before turning down a side street. "See, the Jhitosk are master negotiators, but what makes that even more interesting is the fact that they use words as currency."

"Words? Like, conversations?"

"Like written words. You can go into the market with a doggerel and come out with a new toy, if you've a mind to."

"So if I traded them a sonnet?"

"A new dress, maybe. A space pod for an original novel. Original's are worth more than copies, handwritten more than machine-generated, etc. Even Bleak House wouldn't be worth much if it was a 21st-Century printed copy. Now a Dickens original, that would buy quite a bit here. Rare texts, you see."

"Interesting." Her mind had begun to work - the shopping list from the TARDIS floated into her mind, though she wasn't sure why.

"You wanna take a look around?" He handed her some lines, penned in his own rough approximation of English - at least she thought it was. Hard to tell with the TARDIS' translators always on in her head.

"Sure. Don't get in too much trouble without me, and don't go wandering off." She squeezed his arm before starting back toward the main road.

There were booths for money changers that looked more like scribes - all sorts of creatures were lined up to tell the changers a tale. The changers wrote it down with astonishing speed, writing one copy with each hand - one for the teller and one as the fee for the service. She paused a moment, watching the process, and a slinky purple creature sidled up next to her, it's four legs taking up far more space than its slim body needed. "Need a tale... transcribed?"

"No, I've got some pin money already, thanks."

"Such a lovely accent. Surely you have a tale to tell - a tidbit from back home? You never know what it might be... worth."

"So you don't know how much a written piece is worth until you try it in the marketplace, is that right?"

"That is correct. Although for standardized prints, there are fair exchange levels. Original works must be... tested." The word hissed out from a mouth that Miranda couldn't quite find without being awkward.

"Ok, so then if I have it transcribed, and there are two copies, that likely reduces its worth by half, then?"

"If you must think of it that way, yes. But the speed saves time, of course, and time cannot be gotten back. You must consider... that."

She suppressed a laugh. "Oh, I'll consider it, and keep it in mind if I run low."

"Please come back and see us when you are... ready."

Miranda headed back toward the TARDIS. She rummaged through her room, tearing out pages from books as she went. Pages and pages of her own handwriting, tales she'd told herself. She tucked them into her bra - uncouth, perhaps, but far more unlikely to be stolen, and stole back out of the blue box.

Back on the road, she paused at the market stand that had the scarf she had seen earlier. She ran her fingers over it. It was soft and flowing, like tepid water over her fingers. Images of home flashed before her eyes. She was so drawn in by it that she didn't hear the shopkeeper approach behind her.

"It is a beautiful piece, strangely endearing to those that view it."

She tore her eyes away from the scarf. The shopkeeper was a humanoid with four eyes. Each set blinked patiently while the other remained open. "I can see why. Though I might feel a little self-conscious with everyone staring at me like I was a long-lost memory."

He chuckled. "And a traveler like yourself may not want to attract too much attention." One set of eyes was now watching a passing stranger with suspicion, and the other was regarding her with interest. "In fact, I think I have something much more suited to your needs."

"Oh? And what are my needs exactly?" She was being dismissive in tone, but she was more interested than she should have been. The shopkeeper gave her an indulgent smile.

"Travelers may need to pass many gates, is that not so?" He held open for her a notebook, and a small crackling in the back of her mind sparked and softened as the psychic paper tried to pick up on her ever-stranger mind. "A rare product - an entire novel of such paper as can show others what they need to see."

"Psychic paper," she breathed, as the words on the page arranged themselves into the shopping list with psychic paper crossed off. It was eerie and amusing all at once. "How much?"

He reached his hand out for her currency, and she unfolded a single sheet from her stash. He eyed it, holding it up into the sun to examine it. "This is more than enough."

She looked at the single page. She had only been trying to gauge the worth of something - she'd expected much more. "Alright - how much more than enough."

"You are a traveler like none I have ever met, that is certain." He smiled, gently smoothing out the page from her journal. "And your tales are like none ever told. There is an odd sort of truth to them." He gently wrapped the book of psychic paper. "But if you have another several sheets of the same, there is something that might interest you even more."

"What is it?"

"Show me the payment, first, as is tradition."

"Not my tradition."

"You must understand. It has long protected merchants from theft upon too quickly revealing their rarest and most valuable commodities."

"And hasn't done the same for market-goers revealing their cash."

He chuckled. "I will, then, assume you have more of this value. You have proven yourself in trust and worth, I will offer a similar gesture. Come."

He stepped back behind a curtain, and she hesitated for a moment before following. Another potentially dangerous situation that she just wandered into. The thought brought a flash of memory of the exploding TARDIS, and she grimaced a bit. He must have noticed, because he immediately began to reassure her. "It is where I keep my best items away from prying eyes. This, this I have not found the right person for. But I think you may know how to fix it."

She almost scoffed when she heard he was trying to sell her a broken item, but held it in. Something told her to see it. Her curiosity hadn't been satiated in all her travels with the Doctor, and the awe with which he saw the universe was contagious. Everything was worth seeing. Even the broken parts.

He handed her a small device [insert description of vortex manipulator here]. She could feel it, like a tuning fork resonating to the same tune of the vortex. She flipped it over and over in her hands, her eyes looking for any small indication of what was wrong with it. It reminded her of something, though she couldn't quite place it.

"As I said, with a few more sheets of the same, it is yours. If I have what is needed to fix it, if you can tell these things from so small an interview with it, then I will consider it as well. Will you trade for it?"

She didn't think much of it, instead reaching into her bra and pulling out two more sheets. "That's my offer."

He chuckled. "You learn quickly, traveler. I will accept this offer. But do me an honor: when you have repaired that machine, return and show it to me so that I can see that I have struck a good bargain."

She extended her hand, which he took and kissed. She pulled away, suddenly bashful. "Um, yeah. I'll do that." She paused as she left, again looking at the scarf. Sweeping past her, the shopkeeper took it from its display, wrapping her other purchases in it.

"So as you may conceal such things from eyes who should not see. They are not, as you say, trifles." The accent on this was so thick she could barely understand it, a change from the perfect English he had been speaking before. She suppressed a gasp as she realized that the TARDIS translation circuit had provided the ostensible English. This, this heavily accented language on an alien tongue, was his actual attempt at her language.

She tensed, taking the package from him and scurrying away, feeling his eyes on her as she left. She moved quickly, dodging between tents and buildings, merchants and shoppers, until the strange sense of uncanny went away. She bought a cup of the juice from a fruit that vaguely resembled a pomegranate, sipping it as she calmed herself down, walking leisurely through the stalls.

"Have a night to remember that you wish you didn't remember? A secret that needs permanent keeping, even from yourself? Or perhaps a lover witnessed an indiscretion that you need them to forget? Now, that's not authorized of course, these memory capsules are designed for self-administration only..." The merchant continued on, touting impossible attributes in an attempt to draw in customers. She leaned against the wall and watched him. He was human, or eerily close. Young, maybe in his early twenties if she stretched it. Charming, and pleasant, giving flirtatious winks at passing customers now and again. He seemed to be doing a brisk business.

She looked at her purchases. She'd gotten a few more things, and a bag to put them in. Using that as a cover, she flipped through the blank notebook of psychic paper. Memory. The word was scrawled across several sheets. Memory.

The scarf itself was cycling through memories. Images of home. The cabin. Her father. The TARDIS. The Doctor's face. She bit her lip. She was beginning to figure out that the TARDIS was prompting all this, and wanted to know why. Memory... She looked back up at the young salesman. She began to piece it together.

Years before, when she'd first been thrust into the blast of the dying TARDIS, she'd seen things. She had made some sort of decision, but just what exactly she hadn't remembered. Perhaps hadn't wanted to remember. And now there it was: she had to leave.

The Doctor had entire lives to live without her. Lives that needed her to be gone, gone and forgotten. There had to be blonde girls who blushed and bit their lips, healers turned soldiers, and gingers around whom dimensions turned, and Romans who waited and impossible girls. And to have those, there had to be those left behind. Always those left behind.

And those who left. She finished the last of her juice. It was bitter at the end.

"How many kits will this buy me?" She produced another page and held it in front of the stunned young man.

"How... how many do you need?" He was taken aback. Clearly in the stack of handwritten notes and to-do lists, her journal page was worth more than he'd seen in quite some time.

"A lot."

"Then this will buy a lot." He tucked the page away, rat like, in his jacket. The charm was gone. This man needed money, she could tell. "They're small though. You can carry them all." He produced a variety of types of kits, explaining the use of each as he tucked them in her bag. The last one, a small syringe and IV bag, looked wrong compared to the other small ones. "This one, this is special. This one distills the information in small units in the nanochips that are suspended in the fluid. They're programmed to retain the memory they're wiping, so that it can be available for later use. Only in the same subject though. No memory transfers."

She didn't hesitate. "How powerful? How many memories can I take and restore?"

"Entire lifetimes. If you wanted to wake up tomorrow with complete amnesia, you could."

She sighed, but a strangled cry came out with it. "I'll take three."

He considered her page again. "Ok. But they cost a lot more. So..." he began to unload things from her bag again. "That's what it'll leave you with." She looked down, examining what was left.

"It's a deal."

Hours later, her arms were full of bags. Jewelry, art, trinkets... things she would never need. And squirreled away at the bottom were the things she did. The Doctor smirked when he saw her. "Well look who went and got themselves a new wardrobe."

She elbowed him as he held the door open to the TARDIS. She just squeaked through the doors with all her bags. "'There we go." She sat down on the steps, looking up at him as he started poking through things. "It was fun." She batted his hand away from the last bag, the one with her carefully concealed items and few other distractions. "No looking in that one. The things in there you'll just have to wait and see me model." She winked for good measure, and he grinned, but the tone of his eyes changed.

"I can be real patient, me."

"I may have believed that once upon a time, but certainly not anymore. You are hardly a patient man, you." She plucked the bags up and pushed past him, more nervous than she should have been.

"Bet I can prove you wrong. I can be very patient. 'Specially when it comes to you."

Her breath caught in her throat. She knew he was teasing her, thinking about the bedroom, but no matter how hard she tried, she could only think of how long he might have to wait for her. She had been trying to unravel the TARDIS' designs for her shopping list - these things she would need in the not-so-distant future. She was leaving. She would wait for him. But she couldn't make him wait for her. For all his promises, he was not a patient man when it came to Miranda Larsen, and would burn through galaxies if he wanted to get to her.

She put a smile on, a teasing one to match his grin. "Get us out of here, and I'll go change. Gotta show off what I bought after all."


	17. Chapter 17

"Miranda!" What have you done with my boots?"

His voice carried through the TARDIS to where she sat in her bedroom. He'd gone swimming, and now, apparently, was trying to get dressed again. Interesting that the first thing he noticed was his missing boots.

"Dunno. Did you check with your other things?" She called back through the TARDIS' corridors, not really knowing how far away he was. The TARDIS, as it rearranged itself, always seemed to carry messages from the two of them.

"My other... MIRANDA! Where are my other things?"

She laughed, and oh, he heard that, judging by the string of curses she heard echoing through the halls. "Don't be cross," she teased.

"Oh, you want to see cross, my dear. Just wait til I find my boots."

She flipped a page and shrugged her shoulders against the threat, breathing in his scent as it rose from the leather jacket. She had pilfered it, of course, along with everything else he had discarded to jump in the pool. She'd hidden them around the TARDIS, who was conspiring quietly to cheer up her thief. He'd been quiet of late, as though sensing something on the air that he didn't want to talk about. He needed distracting. She needed distracting.

It was only a matter of time.

The book was a copy of the first folio, the play Hamlet. It had been a gift, ages ago, when they'd stopped in on the Globe Theater, albeit at the wrong time - they'd stumbled upon London as it began to burn in earnest, with a few buildings collapsing between them and the TARDIS. The Doctor had snatched up a few books for her benefit at some point during their escape. She had considered it highly romantic as he read John Donne to her later. Even if it had been "The Flea."

She smiled briefly at that, even as her eyes settled on the page of Act I. "There are more things in heaven and on earth, Horatio, then are dreamt of in your philosophy." She mumbled the words to herself, even as the noise of the Doctor clanking through the garage rang through the ducts of the TARDIS. "Oh, how true that is." She wondered briefly at Shakespeare's insight - that he could write something like that while being so earthbound.

She heard the Doctor exclaim something that sounded like, "So there's my boots!" Which meant he was getting close to the end of the scavenger hunt she'd arranged. Soon enough, his wanderings through the corridors would lead him back here. She flipped another page, then thought better of it, setting the book aside. It was strange. She'd seen copies of the first folio, at a library in Washington, in her life before all of this. It had looked so old and foreign. This one was still fresh, the leather binding new and supple. It had never had a chance to age before it disappeared from history into the TARDIS.

Her own unwrinkled hand smoothed over the cover. Removed from history, and thrown through time. More things than any philosophy she might have had before.

"Miranda Larsen, you think that playing tricks is going to…" She turned, trying to suppress a grin as she heard him gulp.

"To do what?" She set the folio down, grinning as she turned to look at him. "Did you find your other things?"

His voice was low, and he stood in the doorway, unsure of whether to move toward her. "Yes. All but my jacket." Of course he saw she was wearing it. It was the only thing she was wearing, her legs stretched out across the open space between her chair and the edge of the bed where she was resting her feet. He gulped again.

"Maybe I should help you look for it?" Her voice was teasing and light in contrast to his. Her eyes danced with flecks of gold. She was his, and she was perfect. He closed the door and crossed the room.

"I'll just look for it later…" He kissed her forehead and pulled her to her feet, sliding his arms around her under his jacket.. "What did I do to deserve you?"

"Whatever sin that was, you should repeat it." She smiled and kissed him. She closed her eyes as she felt the golden strands in her mind start to warm, and pushed them away. This moment was for her and the Doctor. Whatever else was happening to her, to them, it could wait.


End file.
